Lazarillo

There's definitely some balance in it depending on content you're running. If you're doing DA or trials, you don't get shards at all. If you're doing Hami, you get a ton more shards. If you're doing basically anything else, it's a 5:1 ratio (as lemming noted), but with the thing you're getting five of also having 1/5 the value. You'd also need a hell of a lot more E-Merits to even things out there, too. You can get a Rare component for 1 Notice, and a VR for 2 notices + shards. If you replace Alpha components with E-Merits, you'd need 36 to fully complete the slot, which means a weekly (and Morty Kal) should award no less than 9 but no more than 11 to continue matching the current "goal" of four weeks to complete the slot.

You get common salvage for 4 shards or 20 threads, and uncommons are 12 shards or 60 threads. So one shard = five threads, for the purposes of "buying" the salvage.

As noted, sure, you get threads 5 times as often as shards, assuming you're doing regular content. But Shards are also five times more useful. If you're just farming Heather or something, then yeah, you'll get threads a lot faster, and to some degree, it's worth it to blow threads on an Alpha slot early to make some of the endgame stuff easier, but if you waste threads on Alpha, it's gonna take a lot longer to finish the other slots.

The difference of losing Shards. Right now, you earn enough shards from drops for a common buy about as fast as you earn enough threads for the same. So to make up the difference of removing shards, you'd need to earn enough threads from drops for two commons.

Sure, as long as Threads start dropping something like twice as often to make up the difference, and WSTs give 10-ish Emp Merits.

Good luck Wayback-ing the old archived forums to find the answer, but I'm damn near certain this was actually confirmed at the time. People asked why there was a Kheldian in Praetoria and got a dev response basically saying "uh, duh, she's not a Kheldian, those are just energy blasts that she gets because she's an NPC and they get unique stuff that players don't".

I'll note that widespread use of PPMs was a Homecoming thing, rather than a Paragon Studios thing. PPMs were an experiment that came fairly late in the game's original lifetime, in very limited scope, as sort of an experiment to see if they'd do better than the flat-percentage system, which caused people to kinda forego the "intent" of procs. HC decided to go ahead and expand the system to all procs (except one) to encourage people not to minmax around proc builds and...well, that's where the bwahahahaha! comes in.

Probably not, but to be clear in this case, the Defiant Barrage proc doesn't work in any power in any meaningful way.

First character I ever considered my "main", back during the game's original lifetime (starting around i5 for reference), was a Claws/Invulnerability Scrapper. I liked the concept but wasn't a big fan of the animations, particularly with Follow-Up, which had a weird slowness to it. When Dual Blades came out later, I changed to DB/Invuln instead and generally had a grand old time. However, when HC came around, I kinda decided some of those animations (notably 1,000 Cuts) now were kinda unappealing, and the Claws ones didn't seem so bad. So I swapped back, this time as Claws/Willpower, and man, lemme tell ya, upgrades to the set over the years, and the ability to convert Shockwave's KB to KD, made me a true believer. The biggest frustration now is the degree to which it feels like nothing else measures up.

It's always worked this way on HC. It did not in days of yore, but I'm not sure if it was a change made very late in the game's original lifespan, or very early in HC's (or in the intervening time when what became HC was hidden away). Guess I could go fight some Carnies on Rebirth or something, and see what they're like there. That'd maybe give some insight into the exact "when" of it all.

Other way around. It would be very easy, just would mean a player never pushed themselves while playing the character.

To be honest, I found Valeria kind of a confusing mess. Some of that I chalk up to maybe being intentional, because time travel to/from times we might not have traveled to ourselves, was involved? But the very note that I'm just sort of guessing that is part of the reason it'd maybe be nice to see that, I dunno...cleaned up a little? I typically like Nictus stuff, but this one didn't do much for me, FWIW. On a sort of related note about overabundance of narration, btw, I'm curious because when the Doc Aeon SF was released, I (and a couple other people) brought up the idea of creating a "SSA mode" for it, since verboseness, particularly in TFs, is kinda hard to follow, and I don't recall who (mighta been Cobalt?) said it might be worth looking into, but I haven't seen/heard any sort of further murmurs either way. Is that still something even on the table, or is the idea just solidly nope-d at this point?

See, the thing is, the Skulls are not known for being really effective villains, y'know?

The new Vigilante arc is really good. I only ran it a couple times on beta, granted, and that was on different characters so I still haven't gotten the "true ending" that comes from repeating it, but overall, I really liked it. The missions progress fairly naturally, it's an intriguing concept, and feels very "vigilante". One of HC's better offerings, IMO. The new Rogue arc, I was a little less impressed by, but that might be at least in part because my expectations were really high (HC's best so far, to my way of thinking, was their first Rogue arc). I absolutely loved the focus on Striga Isle for a good portion of it, but it was kind of messy and disjointed, and has a couple points I rather dislike from a "lore" standpoint. I still want to try playing it on characters that have met the various cast members in it before, but haven't done that yet. If there's some acknowledgment of those past encounters, it'd probably scale my appreciation for it up a little bit, I admit.

Okay, another thought. If a non-combat hostage if following you, it can still take fall damage. Perhaps you were leading something that fell a time or a few, or perhaps a combat hostage was following you and counting towards pet damage? Alternatively, you mentioned being on a Mothership raid. Did you plant the bomb? Maybe it fragged someone and that counted for you?

You ever pull out a temporary pet? Their damage counts towards your damage, IIRC.

If all the HC team did, ever again, was to expand power customizations to add new animations and such...I'd be pretty fine with that, actually.

Psychic Scream feels pretty "iconic" for Night Widows. IMO, give it a little buff and it'd be fine. Although frankly, Night Widows are good enough that they probably don't need anything, even in powers that are maybe a little beneath the rest of their kit. So the most important buff to give it would be to make it colorable.

I don't know that I make too many deliberately odd overall build choices, but poppa don't play the procs game. One in a power, when I've already got others from the same set in that power, and/or if it's especially concept-friendly? Then sometimes. Sometimes. But mathing out max proc efficiency with Hasten or whatever else the git guds are on about? Never.

Just want to say I noticed in the Patch Notes that Storm Cell has a faster Recharge now. Not sure when the patch went up and was too busy today to test it anyway, but on paper that sounds like a really big improvement. I'll plan to give it a try soon, but just wanted to toss out a pre-thank-you on that front. Not sure what the perception chances will mean to it, but if it cycles faster and I can put it where I want, it sounds solid enough that it doesn't matter.

I'm gonna compare it to Ice Storm mostly because Ice Blast is a little closer in terms of performance, but with that in mind, if Ice Storm goes down: Frost Breath still doesn't scatter mobs. Bitter/Freeze Ray still apply a hold. Single target hits still slow targets This is the critical point. Storm Blast operates at a handicap without Storm Cell. If Storm Cell was just a damage power, fine. But it's not, it's designed as the cornerstone of how every power in the set works. And when a set is introduced with the concept of centering it around a specific mechanic, and that mechanic can't be used reliably, then that whole set is a failure.

Then it needs to be removed and balanced to account for this, because as-is, it's a detriment to the whole set.

If they fix the jankiness of Storm Cell (or alternately, fix how janky the rest of the set is without it), then /Electric Sentinel is high on the list, as I've been doing testing with it and it feels like a nice, thematic pair. Alternately, Storm/Storm Corruptor because I've been wanting to do a /Storm Corruptor for a while now. Though I may do Water/Storm instead (since Water's looking really nice in the new update).

Illusion isn't built around the idea that the other powers in the set are deliberately hamstringed when used against stuff not aggroed by Phantom Army.