macskull

lol, lmao

The GMs are pretty much entirely relying on reports and their own (ingame) eyes to see if someone is multiboxing, so you don't have anything to worry about.

The problem with “difficulty through tedium” is it ends up with very binary results. If a character or team is able to easily handle an enemy critter adding more hit points just increases the amount of time that fight takes without meaningfully increasing the risk. If a character or group is already struggling with a critter, adding more hit points just means they are less likely to defeat that critter anyways.

Neither of those things are part of damage formulas. You’d have more of a point if changeling somehow also bypassed power recharge but it doesn’t, and most of the Kheldian form powers have animations that are fast enough to have a relatively small impact on cycle time compared to their recharge. At this point I have to think you’re being deliberately obtuse. I don’t know how much clearer I can be - the devs intentionally left this behavior in the game. Your feelings on the matter are irrelevant. Yes, everyone is aware that the behavior will go away when Kheldians get a rework, but we aren’t there yet, are we?

Did you know the increase in damage from a boss to an EB is only about 25% while the increase in damage from a lieutenant to a boss is well over 100%? On the other hand, an EB has more than twice the hit points of a boss. In short, EBs aren't tricky because they deal a lot of damage, they're tricky because they're basically a boss with a much larger HP pool. If a character can easily handle bosses, they can easily handle EBs. Have you tried out the Halloween event this year? The versions of the event EBs at lower levels are significantly weaker than they used to be because people complained.

This game's PvE damage formula does not take animation time into account. This game's PvE damage formula has never taken animation time into account. If you're gonna come at someone it makes it much harder to take you seriously when you're incorrect about things at such a basic level. EDIT: Because I'm sure someone is going to tell me I'm wrong, here is the PvE damage formula: (0.2*(0.8*Recharge+1.8)) / (Standard Area Factor) where "Standard Area Factor" is: Spheres: (1+(Radius*0.15)) Cones: ((1+(Radius*0.15))-(((Radius/6)*0.011)/5)*(360-Arc)) The only place animation time matters in the damage formula is for determining PvP damage, because that formula is entirely different, and we're not talking about that one. EDIT 2: To address some of the other stuff in your post: If the only advantage it provides is to allow you to be on the level of a mediocre Scrapper, maybe that's not actually all that much of an advantage. I never said changeling was the right way to play Kheldians. I never said the devs said changeling was the right way to play Kheldians. I did say leaving it in was an explicit admission on their part that the ATs are in a bad place without it.

I realize there’s only so much I can do as a tester and if the powers team has made up their minds about how they want things to work I’m basically just arguing with a brick wall, especially when many good ideas get completely dismissed out of hand. When you have a lead powers dev whose not-that-uncommon response to constructive criticism is “okay we’ll just revert the entire branch” you kind of just learn to shrug and move on. I’d hope any potential Kheldian buffs significantly bring up the performance floor while not affecting the ceiling, but past experiences with outlier powers show they tend to get nerfed and the rest of the changes don’t do enough to make up for the loss.

It’s not a PvP thing, since there isn’t any travel suppression at all in PvP. If it were a PvP concern they could change how it works in PvP and remove it entirely from PvE but the lead powers dev has said PvE travel suppression isn’t going away.

We’re on the same side here - they’ve already said they’re going to let changeling stick around until they get around to doing a balance pass on the ATs. Where my point of view differs is what the end result is going to be. Based on my observations of how the powers team has handed AT and powerset reworks over the last six years I think whatever Kheldian changes they ultimately end up making will result in peak performance being lower than it is now.

This argument may be technically true (except the bit about standard damage formula since all Kheld powers still follow that), but it holds no merit because the devs: Are aware of the existence of changeling gameplay Explicitly left an exception for Kheldians in the code that fixed similar behavior for every other AT because they acknowledge Kheldians need a buff At the end of the day, if an archetype that is at least somewhat supposed to be focused around dealing damage needs to rely on an exploit to achieve performance comparable to a mediocre Scrapper, there’s a problem with that archetype.

On the other hand, if you're a good musician you know that the instrument a grade school student uses and the instrument a professional uses aren't the same.

Enhancement fungibility is a big part of why the market on Homecoming is even functional. Even HC's player base isn't anywhere near big enough to support a market using the retail rules.

Sprint is not a travel power. Athletic Run is. All toggle travel powers have a 4-second movement suppression period if you activate an attack.

Again, benefit of hindsight.

We have the benefit of hindsight, though. Between inventions and incarnates ED is sort of just a footnote at this point, but for a period of nearly two years it was a pretty substantial nerf which caused a lot of players to simply up and leave.

No. No.

Yes.

We can! It was not.

That’s all great, but you missed this patch note from a week after Page 4:

No, at launch there was no movement suppression and the only negative effect of running a travel power was a large -tohit debuff when running Fly. This was done away with in favor of the travel suppression we have now after the launch of issue 4, which just so happened to be the issue PvP launched so of course everyone blames PvP. (They're wrong, which is a different story, but...) In the entire history of this game there has been exactly one power which got nerfed in PvE for solely PvP reasons and I will bet a billion inf you don't know what that power is. Regardless, the fact none of those changes which were supposedly made for PvP reasons got rolled back once the dev team had the ability to make powers function completely differently in PvE and PvP shows what a load of shit that argument is. On the other hand, if you actually believe that, I'm sure you'd also be more than happy to undo all the PvE buffs that happened because of PvP, such as the 40% range buff for all melee attacks, -range on taunt powers, and toggles not dropping while mezzed.

Well, since the OP was asking specifically about 4* stuff, and a meta 4* team usually consists of three Colds...

Fun fact, there's no travel suppression at all in PvP on Homecoming, and even back on live PvP had its own separate travel suppression rules after Issue 13. The fact travel suppression wasn't removed in PvE back in 2008, or at any time since, should tell you all you need to know about the theory that travel suppression was added because of PvP.

PvE travel suppression lasts for four seconds from when you activate an attack regardless of the travel power in question. You can go through CoD and look at every single one of them - they’re all the same. Again, Athletic Run has no effect on fly speed.

Athletic Run doesn't have any effect on flight travel suppression - if your flight speed is being suppressed it's because of whatever flight power you're running. The behavior described by everyone in this thread is completely normal and expected behavior.

Looks like while the pet that does the damage allows for accuracy enhancement, the power itself doesn't - but it does take ranged AoE, slow, and universal damage sets so you can slot accuracy in it that way until this is actually fixed.