Lazarillo

I didn't enjoy it at a lower difficulty, so I've never bothered to re-run it. Maybe if it gets an "SSA"-level version so I can actually learn what's going on...

AE's already nerfed for "normal" play, and I end up avoiding it on HC as a result. Further nerfing it, or not, wouldn't make much difference, sadly. What seems more reasonable, and what I don't understand, is why they don't turn MARTy back on?

My expectations are pretty low. I figure the most likely reason for long intervals between patches is that the volunteer staff has just been too busy to work on the game.

I like how, past level 25-ish, I think it is, you have to sit on your thumbs after every mob of Tsoo because your run speed is debuffed to the point of effective immobilization for the next minute or so. Wait, no, not love. What's the other thing?

Not a bug per se. This is sort of connected to extremely screwy mechanic. I don't know quite understand the code, but I can explain the results I think: Essentially, for purposes of enhancements, +Damage, and +Resistance are the same thing. If you were to somehow glitch/hack content to put a Damage SO into Temporary Invulnerability, it would actually give a +33% buff to the power's Resistance instead. In fact, at one point, it was actually possible to exploit this to get extra buff values to certain resist powers by using Hamidon Enhancements. The Cardiac Alpha essentially works the same way. The key, however, is that there are no powers that can be enhanced for both Resistance and Damage, and Alpha slot buffs are programmed only to buff powers that take enhancements of the proper type. Thus, it shows up as a damage buff, but only provides that buff to powers that take damage resistance enhancements (which no damage-dealing power does). The reason you wouldn't see any damage resistance from the Cardiac power itself in your real numbers is for similar reasons: because Alphas don't, strictly speaking, buff stats, but rather, they act as an additional enhancement in on each power. You can see the actual effects by removing the Alpha power, taking a look at how much Resistance you're getting from a toggle power (e.g., Dark Embrace), then re-equipping it and checking how much resistance the same power is providing. It should be more (probably roughly 10% more).

Probably not. The reference to those two leading the Skulls didn't come until a couple years after the Hollows was introduced to the game, and even when it did, it was a website lore article going "Oh, uh, yeah, those two random bosses from a couple different one-off missions? Yeah, those guys were totally the leaders of the Skulls all along." It wasn't until Doc Aeon started doing the whole Neo-Skulls thing that was left incomplete, when that was written into the in-game lore as anything beyond a couple names getting drawn out of a hat.

Hide makes you transparent while you're inactive but doesn't completely erase and replace your costume the way that WS stealth does. Warshades basically get locked to one specific Human form appearance the same way they are in Nova and Dwarf.

There are already fairly sufficient AoE debuff sets. The "collateral" debuffs in Poison should feel more like a little bit of an extra, rather, I think they should stay in their current form that way, but increase in power (or make them irresistible?) to make them more focused on single-target strength. Generally, the same applies to the idea of a "splash heal" on Alkaloid, IMO. Its weakness is how slow it is to activate, first and foremost. Making it an AoE just means it fails on all the pets it doesn't hit because they died before it takes effect. That's not to say Poison couldn't stand to have some love done. But it should excel at its focus, rather than try to be like everything else. Noxious Gas being a toggle (as I think you're suggesting?) rather than a click power with an impossibly long recharge would probably also be a solid way to buff the set, too, though it'd be a bit less useful on sets with ranged pets (which, to be fair, it already is), so maybe make it ally-or-enemy-targetable like the "It burns when I walk!" power from the Sorcery pool?

Dominator love is needed more on a whole-AT basis than in set-specific ways, I feel like. Then again, the same is also the case for Sentinels, so that may be what you're getting at.

There's the converse of that, though, too. It requires Mystic Flight. So Translocation ends up eating significantly more Endurance when used as a primary means of travel due to the constant drain of the flight power as well.

I use it as much for the "mini-Build Up" as anything. It's especially nice with, say, Claws, where I can get the initial To-Hit buff of Follow-Up before I hit my first Follow Up. I'm kinda nonplussed on it for its actual teleportation use though because its animation/rooting time means often as not, it's actually more efficient just to run/jump up to the enemy. It's a fun concept power, though, and not very slot hungry, so I do make some use for it. It's just a little iffy on execution.

In fairness, VEATs came into being back when the idea of power customization was still "never going to happen", so it probably wasn't seen as too important.

For reasons completely independent of this thread, I was toying with a Demon/Pain build in Mids, so I checked to look: For what it's worth, Conduit of Pain costs 32 Endurance and takes 3.2 seconds. Resummoning and buffing a henchman takes between 28 and 36 Endurance, and takes 6 seconds. So depending on what you lose, a rez would be a little more efficient. Though not significantly so, probably. That all said, I get where you're coming from (but still would want my Fallout, dammit!). Sort of. I'm pretty sure that MMs already have access to all support sets as secondaries, anyway.

As long as they also become valid targets for Fallout. I want my bots to have explosive atomic cores that don't respond well to enemies cracking them...

I don't need to taunt enemies. They'd be there when I get back. I don't want to clutter my power tray with powers that do minimal damage and usually miss anyway; they don't offer anything meaningful over spamming 0-damage attacks. And no, it's not going to be major issues I'd take care of during a crash, but I can change up my music playlist, swap to Discord and reply to a message, refill a drink, whatever. I'll accomplish as much in terms of CoH engagement by doing that, as if I had just whiffed an enemy with Sands of Mu and then stared at the screen for a bit. If SS wasn't such a "baseline" concept, and if the set wasn't so far behind the curve as to actually feel notably weak while skipping Rage, it'd be one thing. Or if the power had just, y'know, gotten buffed like it was meant to if not for (ironically, given accusations being made at me) the power gamers whining about not getting to double-stack it, it'd be more tolerable. But it's a bummer that it was so close to being worth playing, but instead, we get the kinda wet noodle that is the set in its current form.

I'm not using any version of it because I deliberately avoid playing the game in ways that encourage not alt-tabbing as the most viable use of time (such as SS, or missions against Nemesis). However, the one I'm discussing the one that has this in its power attributes: ...which is all versions of the power accessible to players.

I don't forget that. But I can also taunt and do damage with all my Claws powers all the time. I don't have to fall back into non-concept powers that won't cover the entire downtime anyway, and yet still add meaningless clutter to my power tray. Really? Then why is one of the excuses for Rage to have a crash so often "it's only 10 seconds I never even notice"? You're not entirely wrong: I think that if SS is the only set that is penalized with mandatory downtime, it should also be comparably ahead-of-the-curve. But I've said in the past that if they wanted to, say, nerf Titan Weapons so that it did 0 damage on any attack that built Momentum, that would at least balance things, for example.

And no damage. Thus, again, not permanent. Rage has an enforced period of time during which you cannot derive a benefit from Rage. Furthermore, stacking Rage, increases the amount of time that you are forced into downtime for.

The only real downside to this is that I might very well end up losing all will to play anything else.

It's an intriguing story hook, IMO. There are at least a couple late-game Rikti-affiliated villains that saw the process as a general step up in their lives, and while the cult-like tactics and drugs that are used to transform and manipulate the members definitely put the group as "villainous" over all, it's not hard to see where people down on their luck would still prefer it. That said, the Lost are, ultimately, still pretty villainous. You could apply similar "what if"-type situations to members of other groups. Like, if you took away all of Vandal's robot parts, it'd probably still be clearly wrong for him to want to go running back to the 5th Column and getting up to all his nazi antics because he preferred his life as a cyborg, no? (And heck, one of the aforementioned Lost->Rikti mutated characters who found satisfaction in that life was already a super-villain, too.) That's not to say there isn't still potential for a story in all this, regarding how average citizens, as it were, have to deal with life in Paragon. But it's also something to consider.

It's not permanent. In fact, it has a mandatory "twiddle-your-thumbs time" during which you'll be just as productive by hitting alt-tab. And all double-stakcing does is increase the amount of time you're hit with the mandatory downtime. And that's really the heart of the matter. SS is the only set in the game that has to pay a penalty to achieve "run-of-the-mill" when not penalized.

Basically, people whined that the straight up buff didn't benefit them because they wanted to stack it and be immune to the crash, and the devs said "well, fine, if you're going to complain that it's not OP enough, then how about no buff at all?" Given how it all went down, it's pretty unlikely they'll revisit it, sadly. I mean, in fairness, most Super Strength players of note claim they can never tell when they're doing damage anyway.

Quick question on Regrowth: is there a way to automatically turn a character to face a specific target before using it? I'm thinking in a more roundabout way, I could double-tap the 'f' key to "follow" the target for a fraction of a second before firing, but I wasn't sure if there was a more efficient way to do things, with a handy keybind, maybe?

This is a jot-down I did for it back right around the time of the game's revival on an Ice/Martial Dominator. Though beyond this one I haven't experimented with it a whole bunch. Character in question was doing this in DA with 3 Incarnate shifts, so bear in mind it's probably going to be the highest possible end of performance. Numbers tested against level 52 "Vanquisher" KoV minions (for the most part, note below) Block of Ice: 104.66 damage from power, 28.45 damage from EV. Shuriken Throw: 68.21+50.52 damage up front from power, 20.93 damage from EV. Thunder Kick: 213.31 damage from power, 35.54 damage from EV. Spinning Kick: 214.07 damage from power, 24.45 damage from EV. Dragon's Tail: 143.85 damage from power, 23.82 damage from EV. Caltrops: 3.08 damage per tick from power, 0.62 damage per tick from EV. Explosive Shuriken: 287.01 damage up front from power, 19.02 from EV. Cyronic Judgment: 475.47 damage from power, 16.01 from EV. Also tried fighting some BP with greater resistance to Ice/Smash damage; what I found was that even when the base attack deals less damage, the EV proc was exactly the same (so for example, a Thunder Kick against an enemy with 5%-ish Smash resistance and no toxic as far as I know, did 202.65 damage, but still 35.54 toxic from EV). So as we can see, the toxic bonus seems to vary depending on the power, although it doesn't appear to be a flat percentage, with Judgement only getting about a 3% boost, while Block of Ice gets over 25%. All the Assault powers in question have ~90-98% damage boost from enhancements, except Caltrops (has none). Block of Ice has ~50 damage boost. If I were mathier, I could probably look at just the base values and whatnot and come up with some more accurate formulas, but considering it's perma-able if you're going for Perma-Dom anyway, it seems pretty nice to me.

In some ways, Nemesis count as both, for me. I love them for the lore and for Nemesis himself being such a clever, outrageous villain, and for just the fact that when you get down to brass tacks (pun intended?) he and his followers are so downright vile that clobbering them feels so very cathartic. Unfortunately, they're utterly un-fun to actually fight, due to boring, repetitive power choices and mechanics that provide lots of time-sink but little challenge. So I love what they are from the story and lore side of things, and hate them for squandering all that on being completely terrible in terms of gameplay.