macskull

The devs have said repeatedly that the game isn’t balanced around inspiration use, so it would kind of be silly for them to nerf inspirations. The existing precedent is to simply disable some or all of them in certain scenarios. On topic: I would like to see all t9’s behave like the newer ones. Hell. all of the powers that have stupid long recharges need to be re-evaluated.

Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it something HC will let you do? Nope.

Yeah I’m not sure what discovery is supposed to have happened here, the first part of your post just describes how set bonuses work and the second part just describes how armor set mez protection powers work in PvP.

Excel's peak numbers on the weekends rarely exceed 1100, which is the threshold for the red dots. The only functional thing "red dots" mean is that multiboxing isn't allowed on that server. The server queue doesn't start until population on a single server passes 1500 players. For example, here's peak numbers from this Friday: I can pull up some off-peak numbers as well, but Excelsior often dips below 400 players and the entire population is often between 700-800 during the middle of the day.

If you consolidated everything onto one server, sure. But if you kept just the two highest-population servers, you still wouldn't be anywhere close to queue numbers. Hell, if you just vaporized Indomitable, Torchbearer, Reunion, and Victory and those players suddenly found themselves instantly teleported to Everlasting, it would still only have just about the same population as Excelsior does right now. The only real effect on anyone would be that multiboxing would no longer be allowed most of the time since both Excelsior and Everlasting would be in the red aside from the slow hours of the day. The average population on Excelsior in January 2023 was slightly lower than it is today, so your statement is factually incorrect.

SG bases can be imported from demorecords. It's how people on the other server restored their SG bases from back on live. It's just not something HC is willing to do. The items in base storage are considered part of the map and are saved in demorecords, so it is possible to import their contents with the rest of the base. When bases were imported from demorecords the items in storage were stripped for pretty obvious reasons.

Your post was about waiting in queues, not about name conflicts, so that's what I responded to.

You could delete all the shards except Excelsior and Everlasting, move all the existing players there, and neither of them would have queues with the current total playerbase.

If I remember right, the Alt key on a Windows keyboard will function as the Option key in MacOS, since Mac keyboards do not have an Alt key - and this is where your problem starts. Wine handles some modifier keys differently than you'd expect, so the Option key literally does nothing because Wine doesn't use it. As another example, if you wanted to copy/paste an item from outside the game into the game you'd have to use Cmd-C to copy and Ctrl-V to paste. This is an unfortunate reality of how Wine handles certain modifier keys, and most of the guides or tips/tricks for changing it are either a decade old and may be horribly outdated, or are pretty complex and require manually editing files. TL;DR: The simplest solution is just to keep doing things the way you're doing them and get used to the annoyance.

Does the Alt key function normally in MacOS?

Whoops, I was thinking of the enhanced values, which get into the mid-to-upper 40s for a handful of powers before factoring in the KB increase base buff or set bonuses. Defender Repulsion Bolt even manages to get up into the 50s. Corrected the previous post. Regardless, I’m still wondering where the idea that there was a mag 15 hard cap came from. I suppose the actual theoretical maximum knockback magnitude a player power can have is 93.47.

I’m curious where you are getting this information from, considering there are multiple player powers that have base enhanced values almost three times higher than that. Knockback strength most likely shares the same hidden +400% limit as many other attributes, which means it is a practical impossibility to reach. Adding bonus damage based on magnitude or distance sounds nice at face value but that would likely serve to make knockback more annoying as everyone tries to maximize knockback slotting to get more damage. If the extra damage is significant enough to actually defeat enemies instead of just resulting in enemies that have lower health but are way more scattered, that’s a different story, but at that point the knockback becomes irrelevant since it’s just corpses flying around.

You can get their global name and then use /playernote <global name> to add/edit the player note as normal.

Katana, Claws, Savage Melee, Staff Fighting, Dual Blades, Broadsword, Battle Axe, War Mace, and Tanker Fiery Melee all have three AoEs, which is the same number Spines has if you don't count the damage aura - and again, you shouldn't count it. Dark Melee, Elec Melee, and Titan Weapons have four AoEs (and come to think of it, Elec Melee was recently on the receiving end of some buffs to improve its single-target output). Rad Melee only has two at face value (again ignoring the damage aura) but realistically has six when you factor in contaminated splash damage. As already stated, dealing toxic damage is not generally considered that large of a benefit since it is the most widely resisted damage type on average.

Damage auras matter significantly more in a farming scenario since you’re essentially always target saturated. Their actual impact is much smaller in normal gameplay. The problem with Spines is twofold: Its single target damage is pretty anemic, with the heavy hitters having long animation times. No, “it has good AoE so it is fine if it has bad single target” isn’t a good argument when sets like Fire Blast, Battle Axe, Titan Weapons, and Assault Rifle exist. This isn’t 2008, sets can simply be decent in multiple areas. Spine Burst’s cast time is way too long. The Blaster version is something like twice as fast - there’s no reason the same change can’t be made for the Spines and Thorny Assault versions.

Unfortunately it is my solemn and sworn duty to combat stupidity where I see it, but yes I fully support changing Beanbag to Tactical Airstrike.

Your argument is entirely based on semantics. You probably wouldn’t normally refer to Hail of Bullets as a “defense power,” but the power absolutely does grant defense so you would not be incorrect if you did refer to it that way. That poster is simply saying there is precedent for a blast set t9 giving the player a defensive buff. Put another way - is Parry an attack or a defense power? Is Soul Drain an attack or a damage/tohit buff? Is Siphon Life an attack or a heal? Turns out powers can be both at the same time. I also don’t really see why duration is factoring into this at all, since neither OP nor anyone else made any mention of that they’d want such a buff to last for 3 minutes or anything until you brought it up.

Someone else already addressed the damage type thing, but excluding the damage aura Spines has the same amount of AoE attacks as several other sets - one PBAoE and two cones. Spines’ only real gimmick is that one of those cones is ranged, but ranged AoE attacks in melee sets aren’t nearly as rare as they used to be.

Yes.

Elude isn’t a defense power. It is a run speed, jump height, and endmod buff that also happens to grant defense. Look, I can do it too!

While buffing Spines really would be as simple as giving it the faster animations the other versions get, the powers team has said that Spines isn’t going to be getting any of the animation time improvements that the Dominator and Blaster versions got. I have to assume it’s because Spines was a popular farming set and they’re reluctant to buff it, even though it hasn’t been popular in that application for years and really struggles outside of that environment.

It’s not the vendor listing that determines if a contact can be interacted with while in task force mode. If there is intro dialog for the contact, then you’ll get the “you can’t talk to this contact while on a task force” message. The Pocket D START vendor has no intro dialog which allows you to use it in TF mode.

People use the Speed Boost analogy here but I'd bet all my inf the number of players who go to the Gull to disable speed buffs is far smaller than the number of players who go to the Gull to disable Group Fly, and the number of characters who have Speed Boost is absolutely higher than the number of characters that take Group Fly. The biggest issue with "just go to the Gull" is that it relies on a single NPC in a particular zone who is also unable to be used while in task force mode. If I haven't disabled Group Fly before I find myself on a task force with a character who uses it, I'm stuck flying whenever I'm near the player who decides to use it. As far as disrupting a team being a stretch... it really isn't. Some characters have powers that can't be turned on or used while off the ground, so in addition to replacing the travel powers in my build with the worst travel power in the game, I'm now stuck being unable to use some of my powers. That's just not good design.

The actual reason for this, as given by the powers dev team, is that allowing MM pets to inherit the player’s active travel powers would remove much of the reason to take Group Fly. This is, of course, completely ridiculous, since there’s already precedent for reworking travel power pools (remember when LRT was in the teleport pool?), so it really does seem like the message being sent is “we are okay with keeping this power the way it is even though it is a routine and repeated pain point and players have been proposing solutions for literal years.” The “you can just turn it off at the Gull” defense is the same old tired response that’s been trotted out by players who continue to think they should be able to disrupt an entire team with a single power because they don’t have the self awareness to consider other people. Imagine if the response to the complaints of the original Sonic Resonance sounds causing headaches was “well, you can just replace a few sound files.”

The given reason for why it’s not as simple as being “opt-in” is that pets would no longer be affected by it. This seems a little silly to me since it’s very possible to rework how the power behaves in a way that pets would have the same state as the player. Like, hell, I don’t know, if you have opted in to Group Fly maybe you’re automatically granted an invisible AoE power that only affects your pets and only activates when you’re under the effects of Group Fly. This really shouldn’t be hard, people.