Lazarillo

As mentioned, use the pre-existing MARTy system to throttle the amount earned over time, which would cap the farmers but leave the players using AE normally unaffected.

Now imagine you're trying to use AE for its originally intended function of coming up with player-made story content that can serve as a reasonable alternative to playing the prewritten content. They nerfed the people trying to actually use it to share their stories, to punish farmers who, as you noted, aren't even punished.

As a point of note, those are examples of things that would trigger it yes, as would things like "hitting extreme efficiency in AE farms back during the game's original life", as people did report hitting it fairly regularly. Furthermore, at least as I've had it explained to me by people running some of the other servers, MARTy can be set and adapted as seen fit. It's not a case of "it only works at value [x]", it's adjustable. And that fits, since in our current system with it off, and with rewards nerfed, farming is still a bigger thing than it was in the days before.

Probably around the same place they go with it as it applies to characters: "We're gonna tell you not to as a CYA, but it's not something GMs are gonna take action on."

AE's gone into a feedback loop. Farmers use it to get XP/inf at rates the devs find unacceptable, so the devs nerf rewards, so people who would use it for alternative access use it less, but farmers still pull in more than would come from "normal" content, so devs nerfs rewards harder, etc, etc. I still don't understand why they don't just return rewards to normal but turn MARTy back on.

Put 'em aside and make "canon" the story/end-of-game event that Arcanaville did, where humanity essentially Granted, that has implications for what the present "reality" is, too, but if anything, that might also explain a few things.

We're officially running on comic book time at this point, I think.

From what I recall of lore drops, Arakhn came first. She actually met The Center in the late 19th century, while Uzzano kinda fell into a big pit of Nictus during WWI and became Requiem shortly thereafter as a result. I'd suspect that since Arakhn is loyal to the Nictus, and Uzzano was one of The Center's unwilling servants, he probably found out about the "Path of the Dark" from her in the first place.

Requiem's not a Nictus in the sense that his personality is still 100% Ridolfo Uzzano, rather than being overrode in part or entirely by the Dirge of Entropy, and he doesn't particularly care about the Nictus race except using them as a power source for the sake of carrying out his own nihilistic desires. To that end, I can kinda get where you're coming from...I'd initially thought similarly when writing up my previous post...but then figured that he's also still the kind of guy who would fully exploit any advantage the Nictus gave him, including changing his form, doubly so when you consider that he's kinda a pretentious edgelord who thinks having a nazi army of Hammer Horror knockoffs is the coolest thing ever. If there were ever a "City of..." villain who unironically tossed out the line "This isn't even my final form!", it'd be Req.

No, I think we're pretty much in the same camp, based on this. That's what I wanted, too, and I'm happy that the CoT revamp got them closer to that. What I disliked was more along the lines of bringing back the Oranbegan ghosts without host bodies, and proliferating more demons through the ranks. I would've liked even more Mages than what we got, a feeling like we're actually up against the ancient Oranbegans themselves, and not just their tools. I mean, presumably, the Warriors always had those things strapped to their backs, they were just invisible outside of combat. They're just pulling them from a visible spot instead of an invisible one now. Or are you suggesting that a random street gang all had magic powers that let them pull their weapons out of hammerspace before?

So in theory, I'm not against this idea of Arakhn and Requiem exploiting the Nictus' "racial memory" to shift forms. But I absolutely don't want them to turn into just generic Nova and Dwarf forms. Archvillains should stand out, not look like generic mobs. And from what I recall of Kheldian lore, there are lots of other forms that have been "memorized" from other planets and phases of the war. With that in mind, why not kill two nazis with one stone, by having Arakhn turn into some sort of Cthulhoid thing, or Requiem turn into a giant dog, Shadowhunter-style, or something, might be a more fun way to do it? It would both expand the idea of known Kheldian races, as well as keep them distinct from the generic Nictus you see all around the ITF, for example.

I'd be for something like this if it also reversed. Back in the game's original lifetime, I had a bind set up and it worked just fine, where one of my character's costumes changed when I activated Domination. Which was fun, and cool...and then I'd always forget to turn my costume back when Domination ended.

No, I'm talking about here, although it was perhaps, less direct, and thus, not something people would note as much? Like, for example, none of the Crey enemy models, AFAIK, changed, but the faction's look changed considerably because of how they were rebalanced. By bringing all types of mobs up to level 50, they went from this sort of elite-looking army of guys in sleek, teched-out anime hardsuits with a couple of elite superhero clones as heavies, to this weird sort of hodgepodge of styles that makes it look more like they just scraped together their teams of whatever leftovers they could find. So while individual enemies don't look any worse, Crey look terrible now as a group, by comparison to before. Council was sort of similar. Less decisively, but little things done to update them for balance, resulted in the group looking overall more like their mobs are just sort of trying to dredge up something from a bunch of rejects of other villain factions, or the like. Granted, they're supposed to be the "Council" and thus have always had a little bit of the disorganized feeling, compared to Crey (something, to be frank, several villain groups that you wouldn't expect it with, suffer a bit from), so the "fall" was shorter, more of a stumble than an outright fall, but still, one would've rather seen them move in the other direction. The Warriors were a bunch of himbo-gymbros before, and they're a bunch of himbo-gymbros now. When I see a group of them in their new look, it doesn't really make me think anything's different beyond they have some new weapons. Very on-theme, essentially.

...except for the fact that it had nothing to do with the "FREEM!" KB and everything to do with just stacking a whole bunch, as they admitted. Rad won't be knocked by the "FREEM!" anyway. And as @Uun mentioned it's irrelevant because it's really not even that high-mag of a Knock. My /DA Brute (who relies on IOs) never gets knocked around when the poptext comes up. Y'know what else said Brute does? Tread really carefully around Fake Nemeses, 'cause their Force Bolt will put 'em right down on their backside. Crey was awful because it carried over classic i0 "being annoyed = 'challenge'"-type game design. Yes, make enemies invincible but who will still taunt-spam you... Also, aesthetically, I hate how Crey went from this rather impressive looking army of sleek uniformesque powersuits to clunky looking tech and random mooks mixed together. They're a private army, and should look like such. Not just a random hodgepodge of whatever happened to be handy. Agree mostly on CoT, they needed the variety, and the new mobs feel strong but not irritating, although IMO, I wanted more mages and fewer demons and ghosts among the rank and file. Council feels fine from a balance standpoint but the ideas for how they actually implemented stuff was considerably less-so (see also, the other thing I'm posting about how the "FREEM!" effect is just dumb implementation). Warriors are kinda underused so I don't see much of them, but seem fine to me.

Are you sure about that? Savage Leap doesn't work like Lightning Rod or Shield Charge. At least, it used to didn't, though I haven't messed with it much lately. HC did fix an issue with it in a patch earlier that made it underperform for Stalkers, but as far as I know, it didn't change the basics of the way the power works.

I mean, it's the same either way. If they're hit by a KB, their build didn't account for that KB. The magnitude is mostly unimportant because any build can be coincidentally be hit by enough stacked magnitude to be important. But again, if you get knocked back, you know anyway, unless you're afk farming or something. And even if they didn't, "FREEM!" tells them nothing. By that justification, there should be a DONG! popup for every Stun and a "ZHWACK!" for every Hold. Maybe players didn't realize they weren't protected, after all. The game needs less inane and unhelpful poptext, not more.

This was, incidentally, such a dumb thing to add. None of my characters that didn't get knocked back before, get knocked back by this, so in practice, it's really just yet another KB attack, only difference is this has really silly poptext for absolutely no reason at all. Because, y'know, it's like you don't know you've been knocked back by it, nor is there anything you can do about it anyway even if it is "special".

Like, to be clear, I'm also in the camp that most of the villain group upgrades have been net negatives and probably shouldn't have been done (or at least, not the way they did), for a variety of reasons, but one person's "warranted" is another person's "don't toucha my toot-toot".

Honestly, I was worried from the "preview" images they posted like a couple years back (which were, frankly, awful), but I feel like the Warriors update isn't all that bad. Better than what they did with Crey or the Council (and probably better than the CoT one, though that one's by a less comfortable margin, as it were).

Endgame won't be the same without you. Hold nothing against you, though, and really, you deserve the rest!

I'm more making a crack this time about the fact that it's literally just setting whatever rules you want to set. There's nothing to it beyond self satisfaction, so if you're not having fun with it, you're doing it wrong. If you think a rule is okay being broken because it makes it more fun, then that's the right way to play it. If you think bending it makes it less fun, then don't do that.

I initially wasn't interested, but after how potent it's made me feel when teammates have it, I'm thinking about giving it a try. Torn between Earth/Marine Controller (coral crystal theme) or Demons/Marine MM (Lovecraftian horror).

I mean, I'm not sure how anything other than making a Technology-origin hero with red and yellow power armor could be called an Iron Man challenge. And my Poison example was more a barb about the idea that permadeath really makes sense from any sense from a Watsonian perspective in the first place. It comes back to the main point of "it's literally just something you do only for yourself, so you can make it be whatever rules you want". and how it at least seems more engaging if you're actually turning it into something that fits within the game world.

Well an "iron man" is whatever you decide to make it be, so you can decide what counts. Not that I'd ever find it remotely compelling to actually do either way, but IMO, the best take on it that I recall was a pretty large group back in the game's original lifetime that played it with an in-game justification, as something like "objections to mediporters since there's no way to prove that they aren't just killing you and replacing you with a clone". In that regard, someone giving you a wakie seems fair, or even beyond that, kinda rude to suggest that a friend Poison user can't reanimate you with their Elixir of Life.

See, that thought is also what I'm thinking, and maybe I'm reading something incorrectly, but when I look at the in-game numbers, the t1 has a DPA of 97.87 at level 50, and the t2 has 82.05, the opposite of what you suggested. Piercing Beam, meanwhile, only has 56.97, so it's a pretty sizable cut in exchange for the Resistance debuff, it seems like. (And Penetrating Ray, meanwhile, which you mentioned, isn't in the Sentinel version of the set: they get Refractor Beam which is a "chain"-type small AoE instead). Hence why I was wondering whether the Resist debuff was worth the much longer windup time.