macskull

Nah, the change makes sense, and a lot of it is just standardizing names to what many people already call the pools anyways.

Interestingly enough, the patron pools have different powers for every AT yet they all share the same names. This is a really weird thing to be upset about, since it has exactly zero impact on gameplay or anyone's characters in general.

That's missing 10-15, and sure there's coverage past that point, but it's not in the neat 5-level increments like heroside gets (specifically missing the 30-35). Hell, there's also the 40-45 range, which is covered by the shadow shard TFs heroside. I guess the point is there's a lot more content - and therefore a lot more variety - blueside, and I can't really think of a good incentive that would bring more people to play villains. Hell, even the current chance at 500 million inf d-sync roulette on the Aeon SF isn't enough to get significant numbers of people there.

There are gaps in the strike forces redside as well. Task Force Commander has a nice progression every 5 levels, but that progression just isn't there for villains.

Nah, that's the only reason I'm doing it - and I have been making placeholder characters to keep names for the ones I'm particularly invested in. Moving everything back to Excelsior as soon as the extra XP on the other servers goes away.

I suppose it is leaving money on the table but so is taking the extra time to have someone switch or find a different teammate instead of just starting the task force and getting the merits.

Ah finally, the arc that generated the quote in my signature!

Here's an additional quote from a dev during closed beta feedback for this, to give some more context: And another, which I can't directly quote here due to its context but in essence said the reward is set to one PA to "discourage any exclusion behavior."

I haven't been twelve in decades and I still think it's funny. 'Course, the entire time during closed beta people were saying "this is going to cause some issues" and were always countered with "but it's a real thing!" If you have to say "it's a real thing, we promise!" maybe the name isn't the best idea.

The little footnote at the bottom of the OP should tell you the answer: More Prismatic Aether for everyone without any action needed!

The rewards from this system aren't significant enough that I'd be expecting people to intentionally swap characters to get the bonus, which is kind of how it was intended. One PA every 18 hours isn't nearly enough to get me to swap.

When this addition initially went to closed beta I kept track of all my task force team compositions on Homecoming for about a week and something like 40-50% of teams I was on would have qualified for the bonus anyways without anyone intentionally switching characters. Especially with the 18-hour character lock, this really isn't anything other than a small reward for the times it does happen.

Nah, it's been a running joke since it went onto the test server during closed beta.

Not a quirk, the surrounding mobs are basically "attached" to the target. Would be super cool if they were all flagged to take damage from Levitate, but as it stands any other mobs that get yeeted by Levitate will only take fall damage (which makes this super funny to use on level 1 mobs in AP as a level 50).

I gave this feedback a while ago, but I'll post it here again for those who are new to the changes and are reading through this thread - I have a Demons/Cold MM that I used to test out the CoT and Council reworks. Even at +3x6 the CoT weren't a huge threat - until the bosses got lucky hit rolls with their nukes and I went from a pack of MM with 6 full-health pets to no pets and dead MM in about three seconds. The reworked bosses definitely give you that "oh shit" moment.

I could probably entertain that argument for the old version of FA back when it was a straight tohit buff instead of the mediocre combined tohit/acc buff it is now, but even with the tohit debuff resistance the power's still not great. It's a power in an epic pool and by the time you're at a high level you're probably rocking so much acc and/or tohit that you don't need the extra from FA, and it's not like NPC tohit debuffs are common anyways. The endurance reduction at least takes FA from a complete dud of a power (for PvE anyways) to one that I might consider picking for a few seconds before I laugh at myself and take a different epic pool anyways.

I'm still not sold on why exactly non-Defender Sleet needs its debuff values adjusted downward (instead of raising the Defender values) considering the values have been the same since CoV launch when it was added as a Corruptor-only set, especially considering that Freezing Rain is getting its -res increased for Defenders in the same patch. Re; Frostwork... this one's gonna be polarizing. Losing the only non-Incarnate source of +maxhp is going to be a sore spot for people who play melee ATs without significant +maxhp in their armor sets, but making it into an absorb makes the power more widely useful. Even with moderate slotting the current version of Frostwork is largely wasted on most characters. That being said, changing it to a click absorb should probably come along with a reduced recharge time.

Yes and yes. The epic ATs intentionally count for multiple roles. Each AT aside from epic ATs can only fill one role, and this was the best way to fill those roles while keeping the non-epic AT distribution relatively even.

The alternative during this balancing pass was to change it to have the same recharge as the Soul Mastery version, which several of the closed beta testers pointed out really torpedoed the power. The new power ends up with similar uptime as old Soul Drain on most builds.

To be fair OP's post does not make any mention of real money, only ingame currency. (Sidebar, I have no idea what metrics they use to determine whether an account is involved in RMT things but whatever they are can't be that good because I had two or three accounts banned for it back in 2019 despite those accounts only containing a single level 1 or 2 character that had never seen any more inf that what could be earned by killing a few Hellions in AP.) EDIT: Apparently it's just one account, but still.

On the other hand, this breaks things for people who pick up lower-level missions and then intentionally outlevel them for badge-farming purposes. 0/10 would not have a good time getting the Croatoa ghosts defeat badge.

Not a bug, the fast travel menu is a macro and /cleartray doesn't remove macros.

Here's the biggest reason why this sort of thing is probably way down on the list of priorities for the dev team: the level ranges of existing factions (and critters within those level ranges) exist for a reason. Trolls might be challenging for a level 6 character, but a complete non-issue for a level 50 character. You'll notice that some factions straight-up don't span the entire 1-50 level range, and for the rare ones that do, the types of enemies you see and the powers they have change quite a bit (look at PPD for a great example of this). If you want a contact's missions to remain at the intended challenge level outside of their original level range, you need to give the PPD/Family/Longbow/Arachnos treatment to pretty much every enemy faction in the game.

The already-small PvP population is fractured enough as it is. Non-alpha incarnate powers were disabled in PvP zones at the request of the players, and it's a way simpler solution than trying to figure out how to rebalance every single incarnate power with a PvP-specific version.

Sir this is a Wendy's