Lazarillo

That's the thing. I'm doing that on my Fortunata, too. Fortunata durations for Total Domination are about the same as Dominator base, and Mass Confusion is equivalent to Dominators with Domination up Rarely is the extra mag needed, and for the few it is, just toss a single-target on that one exception. Don't get me wrong, I like Mind Control, conceptually, but I really don't see anything that it can do that a Fortunata can't.

They get the mez protection aspect, and I'm not sure that Domination makes up for better defenses, team buffs, and a freaking nuke. I'm not too sure Mind Control needs a pet either (though I'm not especially fond of pet powers on Dominators in general, so I may be biased). But I feel like it needs something (although...maybe that "something" is "better secondaries"?).

The roughest thing about Mind Control at this point, especially for Dominators, IMO, is that most of its nicest powers are also given to Fortunatas.

Anything still going on with this? I had to miss a few weeks due to travel (and just being kinda burned out at one point), but last couple times I've come to "meet" I haven't seen anyone. Everyone else just get busy too?

My general take is that anything that's "balanced" by me running and getting a refill isn't really balanced anyway. That said, I'm just as happy with them not doing anything to make most of the t9s in defense sets remotely desirable to my playstyle. Just frees up a power pick.

Thanks. I'll just stick to Batzul for now, then. It's pretty close, if not perfect (it also doesn't seem to respect "put this in the front/back!" settings for certain objectives, and it still feels better than the generic cave I used before.

I had an arc back in the day based around a sort of epilogue/villainous complement to the Hollows stuff heroside, and I found the file and wanted to put it back up. However, I've noticed that several maps have been added since the days I originally made the arc and have been twinking it. If I can get the actual Cavern of Transcendence map, that'd be awesome! ...but I can't find it on the list. Just in case, though, does anyone know if it's available, and if so, what it's under? (I'll prolly use the Bat'zul map as a backup, since they're similar, but I'd really like to use the CoT).

The problem with minimum-1 trials is that it makes it so individual players can't use the LFG system to, well, LFG.

Yeah, that's all pretty reasonable. I'll just keep holding out hope that a good compromise is found (or that I can think of I can recommend to you to be summarily denied? 😜 )

As a question on this...will anything be done to make the power swapped to t2...more desirable? I mean, it's nice that Tanks don't have to pick the powers that tend to be weakest among their peers in a lot of cases, but it'd be even nicer if those powers got a little more love in the first place (this isn't just a Tank thing; it seems like almost every melee set, the t1 power becomes undesirable once you get higher-enough to make a chain without it).

Thanks guys. I thought maybe I was just legit starting to have senior moments. So yeah, allow me to continue to welcome our new Rage overlords.

Are you absolutely sure about that? Because maybe I'm indeed remembering wrong, after 7 years, but as I mentioned to Haijinx, I distinctly recall having to deal with crashes even on my characters where I attempted to have Perma-Ragers. Not as punitive a crash, but a crash nonetheless. I also recall that the current non-Beta-HC crash was introduced by the original devs anyway...

In general, the genie's pretty well out of the bottle on shutting down private servers as a whole, as the code in general was leaked out to the public (heck, it's even possible to run a personal server at this point). HC has sort of the double-edged sword of being both the biggest platform for players to re-experience the game, but also is therefore painting the biggest target on themselves. They are trying to go legit, but it's not impossible that things will go belly-up on that front, as, well, if NCSoft were reasonable and predictable, the situation would likely never have been needed anyway. That all said, I feel like my characters on Homecoming are "safe" from any fate more terrible than me going "eh, screw it" and hitting the delete button. I'm having some real fun with the game, and encourage you to do the same!

I dunno, maybe that has something to do with it. I just know that the worst part of the Rage crash for me was always the "you do zero damage" part, which, IIRC, was the case even if the buff was multi-stacked. I definitely remember giving up every SS character I ever played due to frustration at Rage back in the day...but this change has me absolutely ecstatic to dust off some of those old concepts.

Maybe I'm the dumbest of all, because I really can't understand your reasoning. Can you break it down a bit, because here's what's got me confounded: -Current Rage - Will crash, no matter what. You can double stack it, but you'll have that many more crashes to worry about. When crashed, you lose all your damage and about 40% of your mitigation. -Beta Rage - Will crash the same as you have been previously only if you use it like you have been previously. If you don't activate it while the big red "don't push me" button isn't on it, it won't crash ever. When crashed, you lose all your damage and about 40% of your mitigation (though some of that mitigation has been moved from Defense to Resistance). It seems to me like if you're unhappy with the way Rage works now, then you don't have to use it that way and get a buff from it, and if you're happy with the way it works right now, then nothing is changing in terms of how you have to use it. I truly, honestly, feel like I must be missing something, because I legit don't see how this isn't a straight buff.

Probably the same as he mentioned about Foot Stomp. Since the buff only applies to stuff of range 10 or less, the base number was nerfed so that that the buff can, well, buff it (as it will thus now be 20 feet).

I believe Powerhouse said the extended range came from the changes to the Tanker inherent, rather than to the powers themselves, so it won't show up in the creation screen.

And that's what I get for saying "I haven't played anything with Rage yet, and thus don't think it'd be helpful if I participate in the testing". Sounds like they already thought of my idea (if in reverse).

Random Thought: can Rage perhaps get the "colorful ring" treatment when it's not active so that you know it's "safe" to use again? Keeps people from having to squint at their buffs to be sure.

I don't know that I'd go that far. I'm not sure what he did and didn't write specifically, but there's plenty of stuff I liked that came after he was hired, including: -Everything about Dean MacArthur -Pretty much all the Praetorian starter arcs -Some of the Tips (these vary pretty widely though, I admit) -Dark Astoria (which has kind of a lame ending, but pretty good up 'til then) -The aforementioned Skulls arcs, which were good, just suffer greatly for being incomplete -The ideas he had for Kallisti and the Battalion arcs in the Lore AMAs sounded pretty good too, though admittedly here, there's a gap between concept and execution. And yes, that all said, there were also some real story stinkers in the game's last couple of years, too. I don't know which of those he did or didn't write, specifically, either, though.

I've actually been meaning to replay the Graves arc at some point (I never played it on the legacy servers, played it only once on Homecoming, and since I didn't know the ending at first, I wanted to see how it holds up when you know the "twist" ...if it's internally consistent as we talked about with Slot Machine, so to speak), but haven't yet so it's not as fresh in my mind, but I do remember for sure that the arc establishes at the very beginning that part of the "competition" involves mandating you act ignorant, in order to keep Arachnos' eyes off the participants. So flip-flopping does kind of make sense, in a vacuum (like I said, I don't recall the points you're referring to in a specific nature, so that may or may not be what you're getting at).

You better stop that, man. We start finding too much common ground, discussion in this topic'll die off really quick.

For what it's worth, I agree with pretty much all of that. My point is more that "lack of choice" does not necessarily translate to "bad writing". I could be remembering wrong, but I don't recall Twinshot or Graves ever telling you what your motivation was either. Does that put them on the same level? Eh, not really. I just don't think it's cool to trash them on the "don't tell me what I want to do!" factor when every arc is doing that to some degree or another.

So speaking of choice, I've been re-running an old villain arc for the first time since relaunch, and as I noted in a previous post, since it's in a story arc, there is no "choice" in it, no backing out from it because you're already locked into a story arc, and it's definitely not going to be appropriate for the self-aggrandizing evil types (even if it's just dandy for my morally gray, former-Power-Loyalist Rogue). But I'll be cold and dead before I'm okay with someone calling the Slot Machine's arcs "bad writing".

The Neo-Skulls arc. It was never finished. It "ends" with some unresolved deal with Atta, Morana disappearing (with clear plans to destroy the Zig and break her brothers out of jail), and a mysterious third party hiring an assassin to put BaBs in the hospital (and said assassin succeeding). This went along with extending the Skulls level range another 10 levels past where the arc that starts with Shauna ends, and was intended to be followed up by the original Dev team in i25 and beyond, but, well, we know what happened to that...