AerialAssault

I'm all for diversifying IO's. IO's are, in essence, CoX's version of "loot", and while I think the selection we have is good enough, having more would be better. +1'd

Oh boy! Tuesday! Time to talk about Knockback! I'm not bothered by it, personally, unless someone is deliberately trolling. Most of the time though, people are just using the power as intended (i.e. Explosive Blast, Energy Torrent). If someone runs into a herded mob of enemies with Repel on, chances are they don't know that That Is Something You Do Not Do, and all it takes is a kind explanation. If they continue after that, then they're probably not worth having on the team. To the suggestion at hand, I'll be honest, I have been ground down with these suggestions. Almost once a week for over a year, there has been the same suggestion. It's obvious that it's one that's not going away any time soon. Some people's butts get seriously scrombled because a bunch of pixels moved 5 feet away from their bunch of pixels. So yeah, let's add a KB->KD toggle and we never have to talk about this again ever ever forever never again, ever.

You had me at booty. +1

The slippery slope must be a sheer drop if you think "please be a decent human being" could lead to "all no-no words are verboten". It costs nothing to be nice, it takes effort to be a jerk.

Blasters have, and always will be, Glass Cannons. That's their entire design philosophy. And I'm not interested in uprooting that because one person couldn't play Blaster very well.

Add a new power called 'Power Walking' which uses the same stats as Ninja/Beast Run but has the Walk animation

I never said it was flawless, and even in the quote you used I said that mobility was it's greatest weaknesses. However, there is little it's peers do that it doesn't already do as a toggle. Someone using Unstoppable is good for maybe two mobs of enemies, Granite Armour offers the same resilience at all times, in exchange for mobility, which is pretty easy to overcome by utilizing movement speed increases from IOs and using Taunt. I will grant that Radiation and Bio's T9's are close contenders though, they're both strong powers that can be used often with virtually no drawback.

Hot take: Granite Armour is the most powerful T9 out of all the Defence sets. It has massive advantages with virtually no drawbacks save one; mobility. I know this isn't really crux to the argument, but I believe that should remain with one exception, allow the player to jump. Devouring Earth can also jump, even the Giant Monsters (much to my surprise), so I feel it would only be fair to allow the player a small jump allowance. Having Granite Armour run with the rest of the toggles would make Stone Armour a top-tier set overnight, and trying to balance that by making Granite Armour a toggle would upset a lot of people (me included). In the meta sense however, Granite Armour has flawed design, in that it more or less invalidates previous power picks. This isn't to say that the toggles are bad. They're .. well they do their job. But I've not seen any strong argument for running the toggles when you could run Granite Armour, aside from the mobility issues, which don't even wash because the toggles status protection is tied into Rooted, which makes you virtually immobile. My suggestion is to follow the Fighting and Medicine route and make the Toggles provide passive bonuses to Granite Armour when not active, and Granite Armour conferring bonuses back to the Toggles when not active. What would these bonuses be? Don't know! I thought of this in like five minutes. At least then people won't feel like their power picks are a waste, and maybe they'll try playing Toggles-On rather than sticking to Granite Armour.

Serious talk though, I have worked in Games Design and Things Doing More Damage Than Other Things is a well known and cognitive decision. The Devs didn't "accidentally" make Fire Blast the highest DPS blast set, nor is Time Manipulation being hands down the best all-around support set a mistake. It was a conscious decision (though in the latter case there was a sales element, nobody wants to shell out money for a powerset which is bad). Achieving a Thanos level of balance will only remove people's drive to actually play the game. Players, by and large, want to feel like they excel at something, whether it be dealing damage, tanking, or support. It has long been a case in many games, not just this one, that there is disparity between play-styles. Take World of Warcraft for example. Years of "balance" had meant that no class especially excelled in any role. There was no effective difference between Restoration Shaman or Holy Priest. In fact, homogenising each Specialisation hurt the game in the long run, as they're now making changes to give each Specialisation it's identity back. Finally, I'll note how you're hyper-focusing on Blasters, kindly ignoring where true disparity lies in sets, such as Time Manipulation vs every other support set, or Bio Armour vs Regen/Willpower. I wouldn't say either of those sets invalidate their peers, but they are certainly very strong sets (again, by design, to encourage people to buy them or subscribe to the game, when that was a thing.)

Sorry buddy you missed your chance, "balance" threads have to be made on Monday.

Make it so that the enemies can friendly fire as well and you have a gimmicky game mode that you could have a laugh with. As an actual, serious part of the game? No thanks.

Usually people follow these statements up with an idea of their own.

I've been using the Reward Merits -> Enhancement Boosters -> Wentworths -> Quick money route. Probably not the most efficient but I've been able to IO up several characters with laughable ease compared to how the market was on Live.

Problem solved.

It's really strange that common salvage is the red line here for some people, when you can already reject Very Rare Recipes, arguably much more lucrative and entirely based on players selling and buying, whereas common salvage is routinely seeded into the market to avoid the hyperinflation of salvage that plagued the Live servers.

Enhanceable -Res would trivialise already trivial content. The decision to make those Special stats unenhancable was, I believe, a measured one by the Live Devs, rather than an oversight. That said, I think it could be interesting to experiment with it on the beta server.

+1 I think it could be an interesting idea and add some more spice and variety to the IO system.

Malaise and Mother's Lunatics (the old Praetorian enemy group) sometimes use those female police officers as bosses, as does the Crazed enemy group, so they can definitely use attack animations. The issue is that there are no others female police officers outside of them, and certainly no SWAT, Hard Shell, Psi Cop or Kheldians. As far as I remember, the Psi Cops and Kheldians have very few unique costume pieces, so it shouldn't be too hard to include females in that level range while staying coherent to the costumes. I'm not sure if the Hard Shell costume pieces are on females, but if they are then that should be okay too. The beat cops are a bit trickier but should be manageable. SWAT use completely unique costume pieces that I do not believe work on female models. I could be wrong about that, I'm just going from my memory of using the developer functions on Titan Icon.

What would help would be a 'Sell All Common Salvage/Recipes' option at vendors, or maybe, if that's too much to code in, an NPC who will do that for you through a dialogue option.

On a more real note, the reason for that is .. time constraints? Even from making AE's, it is significantly faster just making one of each enemy than making two of each enemy, especially in large enemy groups (don't even get me started on adding racial variants of the same enemy). I am not sure how feasible it would be to add female versions of SWAT for example, seeing as how their costume pieces are "baked on". I remember this being talked about as an issue with the Live Devs, which is why they just rebuilt the Skulls from the ground up. That being said, if it was possible to do this, I would give it a big thumbs.

You notice the misses on 95% chance more because they're rarer. How many times have you used Assassin's Strike or Total Focus and it has hit? I guarantee it is more times than you've missed! The 5% miss chance is the equivalent of rolling a 1 in D&D, which is always a miss, regardless of whether your attack bonus is +9 or +99. Without that element of failure, the challenge of the game is reduced significantly. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it bad design? No.

While common salvage has a lot of use, generally, if I need common salvage I'll just buy it off the AH. Otherwise, I either build the common recipes or make the empowerment buffs to lighten the load. But yeah I give this a +1

I'm one of those people who love Knockback. If I'm on a team with strangers I'll show restraint and understanding, but if I'm with friends then I'll go wild. So, this is a downvote from me.

I'd have to see the Field Specialist in action first, but anything is better than Serum currently. Other than that, i'll give this a big old +1.

Please don't presume to understand what I do and do not find fun. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Empathy is sacred, hallowed ground that cannot be disturbed. While I won't say that Empathy is a useless set, it's use has been obfuscated with the addition of sets like Time Manipulation and Nature Affinity, so I think it could use a little something to pick it up a bit. However, I don't believe a complete re-write is necessary, other people in other threads have suggested small but important changes.