Riverdusk

I always do Hollow arcs now. They aren't bad at all, and merit rewards are actually pretty good. Hey, you also get a nice badge if you do all of them.

Was thinking the same. Shadow maul, despite the complaints about it, is very much worth using, as long as you can hit at least 2 targets with it. This should make it super easy to do so. Soul drain having a bigger radius is a pretty huge buff and damage buffs themselves are now better with the higher base damage. Still won't be an AoE monster, but much more tolerable (and you of course can always pick up a couple of AoE attacks from epic pools and then have those now buffed with a larger easier to use soul drain).

Overall, great changes! Glad to see them live.

I could be misremembering, but I'd swear 02 boost used to be first a long long time ago. People complained about being forced to take a power that "only worked on others" and they swapped them. This was before poison set was a thing where obviously they changed their minds.

I'd move all the controller pets from 32 down to 18. In most cases probably swap the AoE hold to 32 (along with a significant buff to the aoe holds, overdue since blasters often now have better aoe holds in the current game.) In Mind's case, swap mass confuse to 18 (and also buff that).

Nemesis? There is already also tougher content in things such as carnies or malta. Problem is almost no one actually wants to fight them. They are too busy doing their AE fire farms or easy Council missions. Which is what always makes me question the theory that most people want a harder game. The way they choose to play the game now doesn't really show it. At the least you'd need to also look at the reward system and better balancing that as well in order to "encourage" most people to play the harder stuff. That would be a delicate task.

Too true, but it is a little weird though that the starting level 1-5 contacts don't give you their cell phone until you do several missions from them. Pretty much all of the contacts beyond that (level 5+) that you run into now give you their cell phone after completing just 1 mission for them. Not sure if that was done on purpose for some reason or just an oversight.

Exactly. I still do the starting contacts for every character I start. In fact I usually do a few of the the different Atlas Park building starting contacts. You aren't origin limited and can go and talk to anyone you want. I tend to always do Azuria's as one of them as she gives mostly easy Hellion stuff. Security Chief missions in my experience show up usually way before you run out of other missions from a contact. A lot of them seem to be level based. You get to the minimum level of specific zones and you'll then get them popping up in whatever (of the older original type contacts) you visit. Perez Park is a classic one, it'll start showing up once you hit level 7 for the old go "kill 10 CoT in Perez Park", which can be a real pain at that level. A lot of times you'll get stuck having to do them in order to get to other missions you might want from a contact. I'd love to see them just go away. Adding MORE to a generic Security Chief kill mission is the last thing I'd like to see. That'd make it (and the rest of them) even worse. Cool review though. 😀

Some of the attacks are definitely better than others. Some also have some interesting proc opportunities (including damage or -res or +recharge) you can add to suddenly make them not so pathetic. Call Ravens is a good example where you could slot both an annihilation -res and an Achilles heel -res. Both should proc at decent rate and increase the damage of all your pets by a significant amount. I definitely take Call Ravens on a beast MM. There are others that can also be made good. I wouldn't make a blanket statement that they ever all good or all bad. Back to the original suggestion, I'd be all for it.

Pretty sure that is already the way it works. Just now on Everlasting I clicked on the results through 11 pages of 50 results and then it showed me a result page of 18 at the end (568 total heroes). That was pretty close to how many heroes the server stat page had listed. Limit it to just brutes and I got 2 pages of 50 and 1 page of 12. Can't say whether it is perfect but I didn't happen to see any duplicates as I clicked and skimmed through. I agree it'd be nice to be able to see more at a time though. Also agree it'd be nice for them to open it up to both sides.

From another thread commenting on the amazing and creative SG bases some were designing, I was thinking it'd be cool if there was a base building contest like there are with the monthly costume contests. Not a base builder myself at all, but I think it'd be interesting to highlight (and reward) some of the best bases out there in some fashion.

Fair enough and players certainly could. However, more "official" costume contests have been run and they are the only ones that can give out special titles and such as prizes. They could also better highlight the winners that we could then check out and "tour". Anyways, didn't mean to threadjack. I can go ahead and post it in the suggestion forum.

Guess "need" came across stronger than I meant. Just a suggestion.

Devs need to put on some Base build contests like there are costume contests.

The pet window option should just be defaulted to "On" instead of "Off" for everyone, not just MM's. The actual pet window doesn't show unless you then ALSO go and click on the word "Pets" at the top of the team window, so it isn't like it really gets in the way being "On" (and it could still be turned off). Just seems like it is unnecessarily double buried. I can't even count the number of times I've answered the question in help channel of how to get the pet window and having to explain the two step process.

Speaking of that I'm still hopeful the Mastermind pet changes will be extended to controller pets (at least the part where ranged pets try to stay at range). Come to think of it though, phantasm might be the only controller pet that really is "ranged only", or should be anyway.

Yeah, I remember people (including myself) doing the opposite of this change back on live and trying to come up with a costume for themselves that looked like the phantom decoys.

How cool is this? Yay!

@parabola's idea of leadership buffs is a good one. Honestly enemy groups could do with an overall balancing pass. I find it kinda sad that groups never want to fight carnies or malta for instance. I see way too often in LFG channel things like "Level 50 PI team LFM, doing council missions only!" So, the "harder" groups need better rewards and/or the easier groups do some more challenge. At the same I wouldn't want to make the game any harder for those that aren't optimized and just want to do the game at +0/x1 so maybe have the tougher mobs only kick in when the difficulty is upped to a certain point (again maybe with a reward bump to make it worth it).

Have to say I do mostly agree with the original idea. The current situation also has the consequence of it being hard to justify taking an epic pool that doesn't have power boost in it when you go with time. I'd say give Farsight a little bit of token damage resistance as well and use that as the "excuse" to not have it affected by Power Boost (and fix fade's issues). I'd be for that and it'd be a little bit of a gimmie offset for the "nerf"

Exactly, plant I find can be slow against tough single targets, but it wipes out hordes of minions super fast once you get all of its powers. Gravity is the opposite with little AoE damage. Having storm as secondary kind of helps both of their cases. Storm is pretty great and I wonder how much that is affecting your experience. You truly want slow try a poor ice controller, but at least the mobs are slow too. 😁

As to the pet, from my experience tarantula is the best patron pet available. Does some good damage and a common choice for my illusion controllers.

I'd be happy if they'd just fix the graphical fx on fade to not be so annoying. The flickering it causes is obnoxious. Or give it a minimal fx option please. I can't bring myself to play the set because of it.

I wonder how much this would basically just turn every mission into a farming map. Also, how much of a hit to system resources it might add.

I'll add having a confuse power to the list of making sappers easy. Nothing better than turning them onto your side. Never had any sapper problems on any of my characters that have a confuse. AS to Vaahz I've found them easy for my lowbie ranged characters who can easily pick them off before all the short ranged puke attacks can hit. They can be very tough for a melee. I've learned I can't just jump into a group of them at low levels. I tend to bring out the prestige ranged attack powers to whittle them down a bit first now.