macskull

The info window for Empyrean Merits incorrectly states they can be traded for Reward Merits.

facepalm That’s the same damn thing.

Neither is autohit. The power is autohit when you execute it but the power you execute just summons a pet that does the actual damage, and that portion is not autohit and has a base accuracy of 1.0x. You can verify this both in CoD and ingame by looking at pet hit rolls in combat logs (or by trying to hit a group of waaaaay higher level critters and watching as only a handful of the ticks actually land before you get sent to next Tuesday).

I mean, you would just damage yourself and not heal anything because that’s how Absorb Pain works.

I don't get this, Cold Dom is just as good a set when solo as it is on a team. Even if the shields were removed from the powerset and it only had 7 powers it would still be one of the best support sets in the game instead of just the best.

(The fun part is this was a level 50 Cyto but I had like 11 extra in storage so why not make it a nice even 53?)

Me being bored and people being wrong on the internet go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

The timer starts as soon as you defeat Hamidon for the first time. I don't know if the Hive and the Abyss share a cooldown, but I'm pretty sure they do.

Happened to me (sort of) a couple days ago. I have been playing more the last few weeks and everything has been going smoothly, except for this one... joined what was advertised as a speed ITF, weren't able to get a full team and started with 7. Team immediately has problems with mobs going everywhere and is stuck for a solid 10 minutes in the caves on the first mission hunting down a single minion to free the last sibyl. During that time teammate #7 dies twice and quits the team, leaving the 6 of us to finish. We finally get out of the caves and... someone triggers the ambush on top of the mountain. We finally manage to free Sister Solaris, I turn off Steamy Mist, and she latches onto a Nictus boss and starts to follow it away from us. Team leader didn't believe me (and to be fair I wouldn't have either if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes) so we ended up sitting there for a while as I tried to chase down and kill the floating death ball at which point she finally started following me. Second mission went okay, third mission was slow and someone just killed the general in the pack of EBs instead of the whole spawn, leaving me to take out the entire group on a Controller. Last mission was also slow but we managed it. 25 minutes was fast for an ITF in Issue 13, maybe, but now?

Power Boost doesn't affect end mod.

I think one of the universal truths of this game is that 99% of the time the help channel is anything but helpful.

Oddly enough, despite the often off-topic discussions in LFG, I still have no problem using it to find groups.

This is my Fire/Cold Corruptor (Defender numbers would be even higher). If I could self-buff with the shields while still being able to use Sleet, Heat Loss, and Benumb as often as I do, it would be absolutely bonkers.

Microfilaments are also nice if you don't plan on devoting extra slots to travel powers - a level 50 Micro gives you 33.3% to both travel speed and endurance reduction, while a level 50 travel/end IO only gives 26.5% to each. With boosters you can make that a 50+5 which gives 33.1%, but then again you can combine Hamis to level 53 and get 38.3%. It's all a matter of how much you're willing to spend per slot.

The HC market is functional enough that seeding isn’t needed (except for items which can’t be obtained any other way than through the market, that wouldn’t make any sense). Locking rewards behind specific content isn’t great because it shoehorns players into playing a specific way. Options are good and the Homecoming team has (mostly) done a good job with that.

I think we've pretty exhaustively covered the "why" behind that, though.

Those numbers were also from before TA got a rework. I'd wager the number is quite a bit higher now, but of course we haven't seen new numbers in three and a half years. I think at the end of the day... yes, it would be easy to make those AoE buffs also apply to the caster, but it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Each set with these AoE buffs does just fine solo and doesn't really need the help, Could probably have made the argument for Force Fields but with the recent buffs that set is actually pretty damn good now.

To be fair, Empathy as represented in those numbers is kind of an aberration. In those stats it was far and away the most popular Defender primary, but for Corruptors it was in the bottom five and it was square in the middle on Controllers - but Kinetics was the most popular secondary for those two, by quite a bit. Empathy's also a little weird in that it's the only support set that doesn't have even a single enemy-affecting power. The reason those buffs were made AoE wasn't to make teams more powerful, but rather (and this is a direct quote from the release notes for the patch where the change was implemented) "[t]o make buffing easier for Teams and Leagues." That's it. It was a QoL change so people with short-cooldown ally shields didn't have to spend thirty seconds every few minutes chasing down and buffing each teammate individually.

You can slot those enhancements starting at level 7, and you can buy the packs at level 1 if you have enough inf. I think just about the only thing in the game that could be considered "end-game rewards" is Incarnate stuff (salvage, Empyrean/Astral merits) and those are all account-bound so they can't even go onto the market in the first place.

If you think that's messy you should see how crits, Scourge, Containment, and Domination are handled, especially for pool powers. It's a much more elegant way of doing it, but it's also very limited - Fiery Embrace's bonus damage is affected by enhancements in the source power as well as damage buffs on the character, and can be adjusted on a per-power basis, while Molten Embrace provides a fixed amount of damage determined by the source power's recharge time and areafactor.

There's nothing seeded on the market that could be considered "end-game rewards." That's, uh... that's the reward merit system.

I think the core of that argument is that allowing ally-only buffs to affect the caster would result in disproportionate performance increases for a handful of sets (which, to be quite honest, don't need them) while offering no benefit to others. What I'm curious about is why AoE mez protection buffs seem to be frowned upon by the powers that be, or at least why their application is inconsistent. Increase Density is the only formerly-single-target-but-now-AoE mez protection buff but only the smashing and energy resistance portion of it is AoE. Meanwhile Empathy, Sonic, Therm, Poison, and Pain (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some) have ally single-target mez protection with side effects which should be AoE but aren't.

Stalkers don't get Fiery Embrace at all, so it wouldn't make any sense for them to have the flags on their powers. EDIT: I suppose it sort of makes sense that the Scrapper patron powers don't have the flag since Scrappers and Stalkers share patron power pools - the Scrapper ones aren't a copy of the Stalker ones but instead are literally the exact same powers - but Scrappers have had Fiery Aura since Issue 12 and there's no reason the heroside epic pools shouldn't have the Fiery Embrace flag. Also also, I don't think any pool powers have the flag either.