ZemX

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.

The counter-counter argument is economics. If there were no value in soft-capping anything, nobody would be doing it. But really, come on. Your counter-argument here depends on always having those buffs on a team, always having them applied consistently, etc. The obvious reason people build for anything at all is self-sufficiency. These ARE the minimums I can count on when I can count on nobody else. That has value. Before IOs, if you wanted that, you needed to invite it onto your team. Obviously if you are on some sort of regular team where you know what will be available, you can specialize more. This is particularly true on Incarnate level teams where everyone is walking around with stupidly good team buffs. This is why I included Incarnate powers in my accusation about what has destroyed balance between ATs in this game.

Your reply is all about difficulty, which is not really what I was getting on about at all. My bad if that wasn't clear. I am talking about balance between archetypes mainly. I am not quibbling with IOs and Incarnates making people more powerful. That's entirely the point of that "lateral progression" system you mentioned: Making characters more powerful without increasing level. My point is that they could have chosen to keep the ATs distinct by having the IO system enhance instead of add bonuses. Just like the Alpha Slot. But the rest of the Incarnate system would have been better off with AT-specific powers. It was of course easier to just give everyone the same stuff, but it's also more boring.

There's no telling where the game would be today if they had chosen differently though. Adding a lateral progression system wasn't a bad idea. HOW they did it, is where we may disagree. When someone says something like "IOs broke the game" I assume they mean they broke balancing the game. And they very much did do that. The mistake I think they made (and I realize not everyone considers it a mistake) was abandoning the original notion of enhancements being multiplicative, or in other words, only improving on what you already were capable of doing. IOs multiply via their enhancement strengths but also ADD via their set bonuses. It's the latter bit that broke balance and blurred the entire concept of archetypes having defined roles. It made teams less interesting and content more trivial. Then Incarnates came along and did even more of that. This is not me saying I wanted this to be a strict Holy Trinity game. And really, it never was, even before IOs. People were doing wild shit like trashing everything with 8-man Defender teams and the like. The game's basic design still allowed a ton of freedom. More than most. The ATs didn't need to be made less distinct. When you couldn't rely on dodging 95% of attacks on your squishy Blaster or Defender, you had to rely more on your powers and/or teammates. That wasn't a bad thing. Obviously water long run under and past the bridge. but I still wonder if set bonuses couldn't have been made multiplicative as well, with their effects ignoring ED limits partially, the way Incarnate Alpha works. And Incarnate powers being AT-specific instead of just handing everyone a shield and a nuke.

Corruptors are not really the "villain version of Blasters". The whole notion of assigning counter-parts on villain-side from hero-side is a bit flawed because it's never been exactly a 1:1 thing. Generally, the Redside ATs were designed to be more offense-oriented versions of Blueside ATs. Corruptors are essentially just Defenders with the powersets flipped around so the offense is primary and the buff/debuff secondary. They honestly don't end up being that different than Defenders and ever since Defenders got a bit of a boost to their offense when solo, Corruptors haven't been exclusively the choice for those who like to play buff/debuff solo. There's no Redside Blaster, on other words. All the ATs are generally designed to be a bit more offense-oriented than their blueside counterparts, but that couldn't be done to Blasters so instead they spread the offense out to all the red ATs and added Masterminds instead of creating a new top ranged blaster type. Some people will still try to tell you Masterminds are the redside Tankers but this is b.s. and always has been no matter what some Live dev is rumored to have once said.

Has anyone actually admitted this is a glitch? Because it's sort of a nice compensation for losing the cone AoE. I hate how most Stalker sets lose an AoE instead of replacing one of the usually very redundant ST attacks in the set with AS. Ice Melee is a good example of one that did it right by replacing the lackluster DPA Greater Ice Sword for Assassin Strike and not losing either of the AoEs. They've had plenty of opportunities to "fix the glitch" as well, in this case. And haven't.

The all Ninja team! (see how many you can spot in the photo below!)

You answered your thread title with your first sentence. 🤪 The answer is: animation times. This is also why being a Stalker helps. You do lose a cone, but you gain a MUCH better DPA single target attack in Assassin Strike and an unusual 100% AoE stealth crit in Burst (that also helps that 3s animation time PBAoE do better). So on a team with the Stalker ATO slotted in AS, you will very often be able to crit Burst after an AS. Secondary answer to the thread title: The sound effects. I once heard this set referred to as "NASCAR melee" and now I can't think of anything else whenever I team with someone who has it.

I think that goes for any container you have open as well. Open an enhancement storage bin in your base and double-click stuff into or out of it.

Frozen Aura wouldn't break its own Placate same way it doesn't break its own Sleep. The Placate would happen after the power's other effects. It would last until you attack that target again some other way, such as with a damage aura or taunt aura. So in that sense, yeah, it's not likely to do you any good. And if it affects a target that Frozen Aura has already put to sleep, it's doubly pointless. As for taunt THEN placate... placate "wins" because taunt isn't an override. It's just a threat multiplier. It means every attack you make after taunting will count more threat towards your tanker and thus help keep enemies focused on you. But placate prevents the target from attacking you, meaning it will attack someone else in your team if you don't follow up by attacking the placated target again. But it maintains its high threat counter for you, so as soon as the placate ends or is broken, by anybody, it is likely to resume attacking you. And Placate + Confuse is pointless, yes. Confuse already prevents the target from attacking you OR any member of your team while at the same time making the target attack its allies. The only thing you might do by adding a Placate proc to a Chance of Confuse power is increase the chance that any given target is affected by at least one of those two effects: confuse or placate. e.g. If confuse misses its "chance of" roll, the placate might still fire on that target. But again, any damage or taunt toggle aura you're running will spoil that very quickly.