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Katie Hannon and Virgil Tarikoss both prompt a zombie event on their respective sides.

The market for this seems niche: they'd need to have played the game enough to have the money to spend. They've not powerlevelled another toon, else they'd know plenty of folks will let you doorsit in a farm. They wouldn't have many 50s, else they'd know it can be easy to 1-50 even with regular content. At least I don't think it's 30 mil worth of effort. I dunno how many people out there fill that niche, but since the price is a little high to be a complete noob trap, I guess it's mostly harmless. Maybe a little predatory, and hopefully nobody is scammed out of this.

I think we derailed this topic in this thread long ago.

*quietly mains a Sentinel* 🙂

You need fingers to do finger guns.

They have done. There are new powersets, pool powers, story arcs and a task force, to name a few things. The obstacle is not so much the legality (though things are forcasted to accelerate if that pulls through), but the tools and methods to create and add new assets to the game. At the moment, buildings, costume pieces and effects aren't very easy to add. Not to mention the time it would take to make them anyway. There's still some behind the scenes stuff to happen.

I'm always happy to see this topic come up. I raised it a while ago. Giving value to streetsweeping and making hazard zones feel hazardous is one of my favourite subjecte. I'd get behind the hazard zones being available to both sides, as non-coop yet non-pvp zones. With villains being given stuff to do.

I had no idea this was ever fixed. Now I don't need to clench my butt every time I go through one. I must admit to being guilty of liking Oranbega. The one thing it needs is to have the clipping box adjusted or removed from the standing tiki torches. Escorts often get stuck on them like mosquitos.

Ahh, gotcha.

I'm sure you're making a good point, but I'm struggling to understand the logic here. Can you give an example of when increased aoe range on knockbacks is a benefit?

More evidence is needed. Could you get a few close-ups?

The boldened part, more or less. It's not to add more enemies to the map, but to increase the intelligence and awareness of those already there. This would need to happen alongside a map balance pass. Presumably people are setting their difficulty to whatever group sizes they are comfortable fighting. So this couldn't just be the whole room hoarding in the moment combat starts, but a response to a few conditions. A significant goal would be for this mechanic to provide some more late-game utility and strategies for crowd control effects - ie, stop the runaway from going to get help, lower the perception of the nearest group or keep the incoming group out of range. As part of this, I think I wouldn't mind seeing mobs being a little less densely packed. Every now and again, in moments of clarity, it's strange to have very large groups of thugs practising palming their fists in sync like they're rehearsing for Stomp.

I'm hoping that mechanical alterations to how things can be knocked back along different vectors might create some more interest and strategies to good use of knockback. I also think that AI changes could make knockback relevant, along with other CC effects. I don't believe that changing knockback counts as a 'QoL' fix. It's a definite change to gameplay. I don't love it, but I also don't believe that knockback is a gameplay problem. Combat isn't meant to feel convenient and we shouldn't be edging closer and closer to being so cushioned by player-favouring mechanics that we are able to totally zone out while playing the game. With the KB>KD enhancements, it's as solved as I'd like it to be. We should feel powerful in a game about superheroes, but powerful doesn't count for much when the circumstances are artificially gimped in our favour.

Titan Icon is just the costume creator.

Honestly, when you look at such a huge area like Boomtown, it's ideas like this that make the job a whole lot easier rather than harder. If you know that you need three or four blocks to be able to tell this story, the empty space begins to take form. If the zone needs to support story arcs, even better. Trying to design in a vacuum - even just restoring Baumton verbatim based on how the buildings would look - would be so much more harder and more tedious to do without these environmental stories to guide us. The more of these stories we can have, the easier it will be to know what to do with the space.

This is exactly where my head was going. Crowd control is irrelevant when the crowd is so well behaved. These different mob reactions could make crowd control - including knockback - much more significant to a team.

Enemy defence and resistance trends are dissimilar to player character defence and resistance trends. For instance. No enemies are weak to toxic, but this tends to be the players' achilles heal. Galaxy Brain did an excellent breakdown of this. Negative is the most unresisted and common weakness amongst enemy groups. Psionic is fairly middling. In all honesty, I wouldn't give it too much thought, though. It's not like a lethal-based powerset is significantly gimping themselves, and I have plenty of fun with my psionic characters.

It's less about summoning new mobs, more about doing something about the currently gormless group 20 feet away who haven't spotted their friends getting beaten up.

The design of any new areas should have all the care and consideration of a real architecture/urban development project. It would mean taking into account the needs of the stakeholders, the residents and the city. A chinatown area, for example, should avoid being a mockery or fascimile but aim to be an authentic celebration of a culture and a response to an existing demand. At the same time, we marry this with the corrupt, dark underbelly of Paragon City and its crime syndicates and illegal influences. I think there's a lot of room for some great passive storytelling in how we design these sorts of areas of the city by playing out good versus evil all around the environment. Slightly off topic, but if we ever get our hands on the right tools, my first project would be transforming the whole of the north end of Boomtown into a clockwork kingdom.

This would be neat.

There could be some limits in place. The one alteration I'd have to the suggested methods is to not try and make the taunt penetrate the environment and allow LoS to remain a factor. That way, at most, only the current room could potentially be aggro'd by this mechanic. An obvious one is to limit the range of the taunt, so that once a certain proximity has been cleared out then nobody else will arrive. Another might be to flag mobs at random as vulnerable or resistant to this particular taunt, so that not the whole group responds. I'd rather see a change done directly to the AI rather than a 'hack' solution with a pseudopet, but I have no idea what either entails.

I disagree on both counts. Absolutely, the existing lore would influence the city, but the lore is there to warrant this. And I'd be very excited to explore more variety and unique landmarks and environments in the city. For example, a Boomtown redevelopment could have Tsoo funding and take some cultural cues in the architecture. European architecture from the Rogue Isles and The Family may also start taking a hold. St. Martial is also a good spot for culturally themed architecture, in a Vegas sort of way. Once there are methods and tools for world design, this is the sort of thing that volunteer teams of 3D artists who don't mind a lower poly count than usual could collaborate on. It's happening, slowly.

*Quietly reorganises inspirations into colour spectrum order*

Gotta agree with Snarky. Some of the endgame content is a ton of fun when there are interesting mechanics and some coordination needed, but most of it is so fast and easy to the point of being a bit dull. You're not missing a whole lot.

I'd love this. Something that would add a little more engagement to combat. You either take them all on, or use the map and some tactics to divide and conquer. I think the enemy AI does need a stern talking to. As it is, those lemmings way too happy to appease the metagame