Lazarillo

At the very least, I think it's a step in the right direction, and helps to at least acknowledge the problem. I dig Dominators, but they do feel a little overly reliant on Incarnates and Perma-Hasten and such, to the point that I lose some enthusiasm for them because it feels like they only "work" at 50. There's also the weird way Dominators kinda interplay with alignment more than any other AT, since by being a pure villain, they can instant-charge their bar once every few minutes in case of slip-ups (or before starting off). So to get the "most" out of the AT, you also end up locking yourself redside.

He's basically a Crab Spider build with some unique animations/pet models.

There's honestly too many weird, specific float texts as it is.

You start with Mender Ramiel's arc in Ouroboros. From there, you have the Apex Task Force, followed by the Tin Mage Task Force. After that, you move into the Incarnate Trials, in "story order", they go: BAF -> Lambda -> Keyes -> Underground -> TPN -> Minds of Mayhem After Minds of Mayhem, you get to do a short little "diversion" through the Dark Astoria arcs, culminating in the Diabolique Dilemma Incarnate Trial. Once Diabolique's handled, there is a short prelude arc to the next Incarnate Trial through Belladonna Vetrano (who I believe is the contact for both factions, but could be recalling incorrectly on this). Then you finish the arc with the Magisterium Incarnate Trial. The Praetorian arc also gets some epilogues through Number 6 (who is Incarnate specific) and Provost Marchand (for heroes)/Mr. G (for villains), who technically can be done at level 30, if you like getting your ass kicked, but are basically Incarnate content, too. Most of the story arc and Task Force stuff is actually laid out in terms of story during the arcs and TFs proper for people who bother to read the clues and mission text. The Incarnate Trial story stuff is more hidden, but can be accessed by talking with Prometheus in Ouroboros about your various Praetorian targets.

I feel like if you're taking long enough to kill enemies low-level enough relative to you that something with a 2-minute recharge causes "instant vaporization", you might, um, need the crutch? Judgements do just under the amount needed to defeat an even-level minion at 50 unless you combine them with a Musculature/Intuition Alpha, or hit them with a debuff first. Criticals can push them over that limit, but only have a 20% chance of hitting.

I mean, that just kinda says to me that primaries/secondaries aren't where they should be if such a crutch is "needed", I guess?

If there isn't enough in the primaries and secondaries that you can afford to take so many pools in the first place, the real problem isn't with the number of pools available...

...which is frankly not often enough for them to be much than a gimmick. Not that it needs to be anything more than a gimmick, don't get me wrong, but Judgment is a drop in an ocean compared to Alpha, Destiny, and even Interface.

I mean, that's still "humanoid".

I'm not especially a fan of the Level 50 TF "Master" badges. The "don't die" requirement, especially feels less designed for "mastery" than it does just sort of going "halfway". Heck, I've even seen/heard teams where their strategy for those badges was "nobody enters the mission except for one/two designated mission-finishers". To me, the whole approach just feels so very...Anti-CoH. I'm more fond of the iTrial "Master" badges, although a couple of them are a little poorly executed (notably Lambda, a couple of the Keyes ones, and Dreamwalker). But at least the idea behind them feels more fun. I'd love to see similar "bonus" objectives added to some of the classic TFs for iTrial-type "Master" badges in those, as well. It might make certain runs feel less...formulaic.

So, noticing that this is still the case in the latest patch, and here's a new thread, I'm just going to note this once more. And yeah, again, I know it's small small, but I also ask again that it get nipped in the bud now: Please make it possible to disable the Jaunt bar by talking to Null the Gull. Or however it needs to be done. That got overlooked with Force of Will and never "fixed", so it'd be nice if we can see it already in place by the time the patch is "ready". Apologies if this got addressed in the previous thread and I missed it, but, well, if it did, I missed it.

It works okay on Build Up, but on CtW it's definitely more of a "the animation is missing" is feel, to me.

I just rolled up a Scrapper to do a quick check, and the most notable issue I've seen so far is that this change apparently did not get applied to Calling the Wolf, and Build Up. Using those Powers without the weapon drawn instead plays the weapon-draw animation along with the VFX up the power (i.e., the yellow lines on the enemy for CtW, the red powerup FX on the PC for Build Up). At least on a fresh character, these are the only bugs I've encountered. I'll test some more with the other ATs later, but for now, that's what I've noted. Appreciate the work on this, as it's much nicer than the not-really-"No Redraw" option currently on the live servers.

I put a fair amount of time leveling an Energy/Dark Brute through story arcs not too long ago, and it's honestly grown on me over time. Heck, even the Total Focus animation, which I used to hate, doesn't seem too bad. But yeah, I will say that if you wanna move the ET animation to Stun just so you can skip the power with that animation...we're gonna disagree pretty hard on what constitutes good game balance.

It's pretty close to what I'd want, actually. I honestly think buffing Stun should be in the cards, though; IMO, it's too easy of a skip. My ideal wold be to give Stun the old ET animation (and maybe bump the mag to 4), ET the current Stun animation, and Total Focus the current ET animation. It speeds the set up a little, and also adds a nearly-isntant "take that one guy out of combat for a few seconds" button.

Just remember, planning to test a buff doesn't mean they'll actually do a buff. Consider Rage. They buffed it, but it wasn't OP enough for people, so it got pulled. Expect similar to happen to EM when the "buffs" don't involve using the old 1-second ET animation while also doubling the damage on it. Honestly, ET's current animation doesn't look like a "transfer" at all to me, though. More like a "Total Focus". The idea of "Energy Transfer" looking deceptively subtle for its extreme power sorta fits, to me.

I don't get this one.

The problem with Unstoppable (and t9s in general) is typically in the balancing. One With the Shield and Strength of Will, for example, mitigate the crash, but I always end up dropping them because I barely even notice them during their (relatively short) uptimes anyway. So putting Unstoppable on par with those still makes it an easy skip, I feel like (and I agree, that nothing in a primary or secondary should feel like that...although from what I understand, that is not the HC powers philosophy in general at the moment, so folks like us may be outta luck anyway). I think something more along the lines to Moment of Glory is closer to the theme of an "emergency button". Maybe changing Unstoppable to be something like an entire health bar's worth of +Absorb? Sort of like a "pre-loaded" self-rez. It'd probably need a pretty extreme recharge, or fixed recharge, though (I'm not especially fond of the latter, either, but most seem to tolerate it).

This is a biggie. Part of the reason I dropped Spinning Kick when HC nerfed it was because it was already pretty sketchy when it came to targeting, especially when it came to vertical differences. If the cone ain't huge (which Spinning Kick is very much not) you'll likely hit nothing but air, with the "facing cone" powers.

Not true. Cottage Rule just means not taking away functionality that exists within a power and replacing it with a different functionality. You can add new functions to a power that work on top of the originals, though. Look at certain Blaster sustains like Touch of the Beyond and Force of Thunder. Originally, they were a single target Terrorize and an AoE Stun/Knockback. Now they are a single target Terrorize and an AoE Stun/Knockback that also buff the user's Regen. You could do similar things with Force Field to maintain all its original purposes while adding thematically-appropriate sorts of expansions to the powers. Maybe something like taking Force Bolt and saying "the recoil from knocking back the target fills the area around you with energy, increasing your damage and that of nearby allies for a short time". Or by adding some +Absorb to the team buff shields on top of the Defense they already provide.

I hope I can speak for others on Everlasting when I say "most of us'll miss ya". Hope Excelsior's a better experience for you, though.

As others have noted, it wasn't going to be a "full time" shift, or at least, not as far as it had been previously plotted out. And IIRC, the trend in the game's story (which was, similarly IIRC, more or less confirmed by the story staff) is that "evil Statesman" was the default. The Marcus Cole of Primal Earth was actually the exception all along, as "dude with a rather self-righteous view of justice" + "empowered by the literal incarnation of leadership through overwhelming power" = "we're gonna conquer the world and do things my way", 99% of the time. So in a way, the "mirror" Marcus Cole is the one that died.

I like this idea a lot as well, it's even a nice sort of balance to Warshades, whose powers tend to have a "gravity" theme, the idea that PBs would, to the counter of that, make enemies "float" is kinda neat.

"Return" is probably not the right word. I'd like to see his removal undone. It didn't really add much to the setting except confusion over continuity, and it took out some of the more "epic" moments of the game. I suspect that even as HC moves to slowly-but-surely add new story content to the game (like they already did with some of the new arcs) we won't see won't see any real advancement of "canon", as, even assuming NCSoft negotiates in good faith (I still have my doubts), they'll want to hold on to the characters that are considered their "intellectual property". So the idea of moving the "canon" forward from the rather messy state it was in as of i24 is not going to be fixable. Better, then, to revert it just a touch, IMO.

The whole of the Kheldian war stuff is one of the cooler parts of the CoH setting, IMO, so I've been wanting to get back in and play a PB for a while now, but it's kinda hard to get into 'em. Dwarf and Light Form feel too...redundant with each other, especially when Dwarf, especially, requires a lot of mutually exclusive slots to make work. And then, of course, there's the knockback-scatter effect on some of the AoE attacks, and having to cope with that by using an extra enhancement slot. That's not necessarily a PB-restricted issue, but the fact that the AT is so starved for slots does make it even trickier to manage. Oh, and while I get why the animation was changed on Solar Flare back in the day, honestly, I really wish it were still an option to use the old one. Any chance of getting it back in the Dwarf version, or maybe even when using the human-form version when not flying (sorta like Air Superiority and other attacks with the same animation play slightly differently when flying versus when on the ground)?