ZemX

The queue has been moved outside to the steps of City Hall. But only during a Positron 1 Task Force when @Snarky is on the team. Please line up at the door upon entering the last mission. Someone will be... with you shortly.

Not everyone forgets this. Some of us just think it's an enduring myth. Bodyguard Mode was a whole issue later than CoV. It was certainly true from the start that MM pets could take an alpha, probably better than a Brute. But even so.... that's surviving. Not "tanking." One redside AT got tanker armors and melee damage sets, mez protect, high resistance, and Taunt. And it wasn't MMs.

On the one hand, I am sure you won't have trouble finding people who think that particular buff *was* OP. On the other hand, though, I think @Luminara was speaking of allowing just anybody the same buff. As a Tanker fan, that'd piss me off more than a little. We can give everyone radius/arc/cap buffs for AoE when my Tanker gets Brute Fury and Stalker Crits. Who's on board? 😈 To put it another way, the cost of gaining that buff is playing a Tanker, just as the cost of gaining Fury is playing a Brute, etc. etc.

It's probably taking you a few seconds to move to the next fight so you only notice having to stop and wait a few more for Hide to engage. I also tend to view time between fights as essentially free. I wouldn't run away during a fight but spending a couple more seconds to re-engage Hide after a fight? Sure, why not? Someone who is overly concerned with their total map clear time might argue different, but to me that sort of min/maxing is boring. I like taking my time approaching a fight. Deciding who best to take out first and how quickly I can do it. If I'm not having this kind of fun playing a Stalker, in my opinion, I should be playing a Scrapper or Brute instead. That AS from Hide didn't take me 3.1 seconds to land. It took zero seconds. My clock starts when the enemy first knows I am there. 😈

Hmm... if I make a Stone Melee tank called "StoneDark McDark" will you notice it's just Rad/Stone colored black? Oh wait, was that out loud?

1. It's probably 0.5 to 1 second slower than most sets' normal superior damage strike that people insist should be used instead. 2. You're hidden, so ideally nobody is attacking you during that whole extra one second. 3. You get some nice debuff and fear effects that can happen when you land AS from Hide. 4. If you miss, you're still hidden and nobody is alerted and you can still then use your big hitter as a backup, gaining the same Hide crit. 5. You will most often be hidden *after* attacking as well thanks to the ATO in AS which means NOW you can use your other "big hitter" and get another crit. In other words, within two seconds or so of opening hostilities you can have piled a crap ton of damage into a dangerous enemy. On a team... it can be admittedly iffy sometimes. If you are not a few seconds ahead of the team getting to the next fight, you run the risk of being interrupted by an AoE barrage as the enemy opens up on teammates. Even with high AoE defense this can be a common enough problem. I make the call depending how things are going. A lot depends on how well I am putting down bosses at the START of a fight. if they are left-over at the end, I usually can't zip to the next spawn ahead of everyone else. If they are a few seconds away from droping dead... yeah, I might leave. It's valuable to be able to put down bosses or other troublesome enemies fast at the start of a fight. I do that if I can on a team. Let the AoE specialists overkill minions three times over if they want. That's not most Stalkers' strong suit. Solo, I always open with AS. There's no good reason not to. You are putting scale 7 melee damage into an enemy before the fight even starts and likely getting rehidden as a bonus. Whatever you were going to use from Hide instead of AS, whether AoE or ST, you can just as well use *after* AS and you will usually crit just the same on that too.

Usually not, but you have to look at the specific cone attack. Some few cone attacks in melee attack sets ARE actually classified as Ranged AoE and accept range enhancement and ranged AoE sets instead of melee AoE. Frost in Ice Melee is one example. Shockwave in Claws is another. Frost is actually pretty silly on a Tanker. It can be enhanced to 15ft range and because of Gauntlet, has a 135 degree arc and hits up to 16 targets.

Not much different than the point I was making. I was responding to the notion that most people play blueside because they like playing good guys. A few do, I am sure. Not most. Most people play on Excelsior and if most people play on Excelsior because they want to play where the most people are then "most people" play blueside because of the population, not the imaginary morality. Even if there were only one server in all of Homecoming, it'd still be weird to look at the side that is literally smaller and has less content and conclude the population imbalance must be due primarily to... roleplaying?

This is not a fact. In fact, it's more likely the opposite. Right as I type this: Excelsior Hero-to-Villain ratio: 6.1. Everlasting Hero-to-Villain ratio: 3.0 In other words, on the unofficial roleplaying server, where presumably people care MORE about the in-character motivations and storylines of their alter-egos, players are twice as likely to choose villains as they are on Excelsior. This might be a superhero MMO and it's cool if this matters to you personally, but you are seriously then projecting if you think any significant number of people on Excelsior would lose sleep over being asked to deliver some innocent civilians for live vivisection by Vahzilok surgeons. You'd first have to believe they even READ the mission text. The much more simple explanation for the population imbalance is that it's always been imbalanced and there continues to be no incentive for it to be otherwise. There's always been more content and more people blueside. Why would that change when it's so much easier to get a team blueside and so much more convenient to play on one when you're a hero or vigilante? Just look at server populations themselves. HC devs just had to offer XP incentives for people to move. The content is exactly the same on all the servers. Literally the only difference is how many people are on each server. Without something like that kind of incentive, nobody is gonna move. And even with it, only SOME people have taken them up on that offer it looks like. Large populations are a huge draw all by themselves.

I assume because of the DC hero "Atom Smasher". Appeal and tell them you're actually a supervillain that smashes Automated Teller Machines and that this must all be just a big misunderstanding. 🤪

I've never really gotten into Dark, though some people love it. Rad Armor is certainly easier to make tough because it has three easy survival layers: Resistance, Absorb, and Heal. What is not resisted, hits the absorb shield. When that is gone, it hits your health bar and the heal can take care of it. If they can't eat the Absorb shield before it's recharged again, you're immortal. If they can whittle it all the way down then it pretty much acts as a second heal because once it is available, it goes up and your real hit points can just regen back to 100% without fighting against incoming damage. Dark relies on, in my opinion, less straight-forward survival layers. The Resistance is solid and the heal is obvious and very good, but beyond that it has several minion-mezzing auras that do weak mag 2 mez effects. This can nullify minions but unless stacked with something else, doesn't affect anything higher than that. You can certainly work with this but it's not as falling-off-a-log easy as Rad Armor. And Dark with all that stuff running is a serious endurance hog. Rad Armor on the other hand not only protects you from endurance drain, but gives you bountiful extra recovery and the means for more in the AoE self-heal. So it just keeps running even under heavy end drain fire and you don't have to go to great lengths to shore up endurance recovery. I run most of my RadA tanks with just one slot in Health and Stamina. Perf Shifter in Gamma Boost and Theft of Essence in Rad Therapy. That's all you need.

That's pretty funky.

If you're the anybody, don't go off soloing the other half of the map. This is not a tanker issue. Unless the team is just embarrassingly overpowered for the content.. play as a team. And also, playing as a team means sharing responsibility. A good nine times out of ten when someone falls on a team, it's because they did something unwise. Not because it was ONE person's job to keep them alive no matter how reckless they were. I can't tell you how many times have I have tried typing "Now don't everyone just run into the middle of this ro....." only to finish it "... or THAT will happen." Did I really NEED to say something? The tanker that's been cannonballing into every spawn just pulled up short and stopped. Maybe notice that? Stalkers and Scrappers are GREAT at eliminating bosses and other troublesome single enemies. Controllers/Doms are fantastic at neutering whole groups but also at focusing those same troublesome enemies and turning them into statues. Too often, I think people ignore their chosen AT's specialties in a race to simply do the most AoE damage. Congrats on 4x overkilling all those trash minions, guys. But it seems an Executioner has again brained Bob the Blaster when nobody else was looking! Poor Bob!

This. Probably Level 18 or 19. It does not show on the combat monitor. Here is a Level 7 I have:

15. When someone asks for 10 rules, definitely go all the way to 15 at least. Probably more.

Neither Safeguards or Mayhems are run very often so it's more of a red vs. blue thing if you're having more trouble forming a Mayhem. Most radio/paper teams will skip them whenever they come up so they can keep processing random missions.

I've only run mine with the group so far, so I was assuming the plan is still Talos bank + Synapse... but I can do whatever.

It is not terribly important unless you are interested in really accurately calculating how much damage per second you are doing with a sequence of attack powers and making sure this is an "optimal" sequence. Min/Maxers who want to be sure they are doing the most damage possible care greatly about this but most can ignore it. This is otherwise a pretty relaxed game and game community. If you just want to run around using whatever powers seem cool to you whenever they are available... you'll do just fine.

Been awhile since I played a NB stalker but I recall having a similar problem with Assassin Staff before the redraw changes. It would happen whenever I used AS without first drawing the weapon some other way. e.g. Build-Up + AS would always work because BU would draw and AS would animate correctly. But just AS from Hide would get messed up. Wonder if that's crept back in. Haven't noticed it and I've definitely played my Staff Stalker since the redraw changes.

The VTM video games were good for this sort of thing. You had all sorts of vampire powers and claws and stuff... but also automatic weapons, grenade launchers, swords, baseball bats... really anything.

Vampires are easy. Just go with a... *checks notes*... ah yes, Savage Melee Dark SS Mind Psy Necromancy Invuln Dark Armor Dark Miasma Dark Affinity TankerBruteStalkerControllerDomMM. Oh yeah.. with Sorcery pool... duh!

Sure seems like a bug. If you open the tailor on any costume and it's already showing a cost... that's a bug. It should only cost you to change something and if you've touched nothing yet, there should be no cost. If an option is removed, like No Redraw, and you had that selected, then it should have already been changed offline by the patch. It should not show up as a change in the costume creator. If you try to import a saved costume that has No Redraw selected, I'd expect to get that message "some options not available, do you want to try importing anyway?" If you do see a cost immediately upon entering the tailor screen, try going to the individual costume parts that show a cost and hit "revert" arrow next to it to see if the cost goes away. I've seen that before and it's worked for me. But it might not on a costume piece that no longer CAN be customized. Might have to file a ticket.

Not sure I've tried soloing it to be honest. I suppose it's possible it scales down the number of New Praetorians you face based on the team size but I can't think of any other mission that does that with named NPC enemies like that. On a full team, it's a heck of a challenge compared to its blue counterpart.

You're kidding, right? Mr. G's second mission has you fight five EBs/AVs from the New Praetorians at once while being ambushed by PPD after robbing the Brickstown bank. The similar mission from Provost Marchand gives you four B-List villain EBs (same losers you fight in Safeguard missions) you can fight one at a time with their associated goons while working your way through the bank, It's a total joke by comparison. I'll give you Calvin Scott is a problem for anyone who can't handle his mines but he's nothing close to fighting ALL the New Praetorians at once while being ambushed repeatedly.