macskull

Jump Pack/Steam Jump are getting removed because it is possible to chain the two and therefore never touch the ground, ever.

No, no, "holy" in that context just means it puts lots of holes in the enemy.

You can buy a 2-minute version of the Raptor Pack for 10k inf at any arena vendor (I think they are going to be adding vendors that sell them in the PvP zones as well but not 100% sure).

I've found the best part about General is I can simply remove it from my chat tabs because 99% of the time there's nothing worthwhile being said.

Yeah as far as I know, AS's crit damage (slow cast only) is the only unresisted damage left in the game right now. I don't know that I'd make other Stalker crits entirely unresisted. Maybe 25% or 50% or something. That would definitely need some tweaking, and should only apply to melee attack crits. Can probably make similar arguments for Scrapper crits as well, and make a smaller (10%?) portion of Tanker/Brute damage unresisted. I can't comment too much on individual power tweaks since most of my PvP Stalker experience was either on an Elec/WP in RV on Freedom on live, or a PvE-built Psi/SR on Excelsior here. Exclusive of the table in the OP or my spitballing above, Greater Psi Blade is absolutely the best non-AS/non-snipe Stalker attack because it does about 33% more damage than the damage formula suggests it should (it's about 206 instead of 153) and it can occasionally gain another few hundred damage from Insight and it can take hold procs.

It was my understanding that the WB nukes were still allowed because they were temp powers you could obtain in a PvP zone. Same for Shivans.

Ehhh, if CoP buffs are out that one should be too, especially since you can get it an infinite number of times.

This is why the beginner's luck mechanic exists. There's also a huge difference between "feels like" and "is like," especially when the ability exists to prove one or the other. When people say they have issues like that ("I always pop Aim/BU/a tray of yellows and miss every attack!") I will ask for combat logs and inevitably find one of a few things is happening: The player is unable to produce the combat logs, making their claim unable to be tested The player produces combat logs, and after further examination everything checks out - this one can be tricky because there are some powers that do not show every hit roll in the combat logs so it can seem like you are missing twice in a row with 95% chance to hit but that is not what is actually happening The player produces combat logs that show an odd scenario which I'm unable to replicate The player has found a bug The first two options happen far more often, the third option happens extremely rarely (I think maybe once in the last year and a half), and the fourth option almost never happens. There was a thread several months back about how the game's hit roll RNG was biasing numbers >95 for players only and not NPCs, but the end result of that thread was "many powers only show a hit roll on misses and not hits so it would naturally bias numbers >95 if you're only looking at combat logs." EDIT: Another couple things go into this discussion. Perception bias is probably the biggest one, because you don't notice those 95% of times you hit a target, but you definitely notice the 5% of times you don't. The next one is simple probability and accepting that just because something is extremely unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen. For example, there's an 0.25% chance I will miss two attacks with 95% hit rolls in a row (not counting the one in between where streakbreaker forced a hit) which means it is unlikely to happen but not impossible.

CT has half the range of Jaunt and isn't affected by range bonuses plus requires picking an extra power pool, so it's unlikely to see much use in organized PvP.

I think it's far less controversial in zone than in arena, but I think Jaunt's prevalence (and perceived necessity to the point where most PvP builds now forego Hasten to pick up Speed of Sound) is a symptom rather than the problem. What exactly that problem is is a different discussion and it's probably not one you'll get the PvP community (or arena community at least) to agree on completely.

I'm pretty sure those got removed from arena temps and whatever system was used to make that happen just made them not work, period. "Enable non-arena temporary powers" should allow you to use them for sure.

They are adding PvP-specific accolades to the arena vendors for 10k inf each. That way if you earned the accolades for PvE use you'll still have them, then visit the arena vendor and drop 50k on the PvP-specific ones. It was easier from a code standpoint to do this than to make the PvE and PvP versions mutually exclusive.

Gangbuster is minions and lieutenants now, not bosses (those have a separate badge). Still, if I'm in a "just get this done" mood I can get 3 of the 4 passive accolades redside in around 2 hours not counting damage farming time (another few hours that can be done while I'm off doing something else so I don't count it as time spent). I recognize that some of these badges are more difficult for certain characters to get (damage taken, debt, etc.) so I just knock them out all at once so it is the same process regardless of which character I'm getting them on.

Teleport's cast time and hover period make it pretty useless for that sort of thing.

Also worth nothing that many key powers in control/support sets have higher-than-normal base accuracy (for example, Controller single-target holds and immobilizes have a base 90% chance to hit instead of 75%). Not only does this improve their chance to hit right out of the box, it also means any accuracy slotting or bonus will be that that much more effective (1.2x more, in my example).

I'm aware of this debate, I've read the last few pages of this thread. If you have a >90% chance to hit, the game will allow one miss before the streakbreaker forces a hit. If I throw a 16-target-maximum AoE at 16 targets and have a 95% chance to hit each one, here is what would happen: Because each target's hit roll is calculated separately, and each target should have a 95% chance of being hit, the chance that all sixteen targets get hit is (0.95)16, or about 44%. That's before streakbreaker is factored in. You may be saying "but how can that be a 44% chance if my hit rolls are 95%!?" Well, that's probability at work, and streakbreaker exists to remove a little bit of the "R" from the "RNG" that is this game's combat system. Let's say I missed the first target. We'll assume this is a targeted AoE power, in which hit rolls are checked from the center moving outward until the target cap is reached. I miss the first target. Streakbreaker forces a hit on the next-closest target. The third-closest target is checked against. Let's say I miss again. Streakbreaker forces a hit on the fourth-closest target. This process repeats until all targets in radius have been checked or the target cap of the powers is reached. These hit rolls are calculated by the game in the order I described but it happens so quickly as to be essentially instantaneous, resulting in what to your eyes looks like multiple simultaneous misses. Is it theoretically possible for every one of those rolls to result in a miss except the ones streakbreaker forces hits on? Sure, and then you'd end up hitting 8 of the 16 targets, but the odds of 8 straight 95% hit rolls missing is (0.05)8 or about 0.000000004%. That's 4 in one billion. Given that, it is possible for you to miss the initial target of an AoE and then miss that same target with a follow-on attack, but that's because streakbreaker only looks at individual hit rolls and not individual powers.

Yes it is. That is literally how the streakbreaker works. It is impossible for you to miss more than once in a row if you have >90% chance to hit with all the attacks you use in that window. I was going to reply to your earlier post about missing multiple 95% hit rolls in a row but I figured someone would accuse me of being pedantic, but now I realize I should have.

People complain about the 95% hit chance and missing a lot, but the funny thing about streakbreaker is that if you consistently have 95% chance to hit over time streakbreaker will make your final hit rate higher than 95% because every miss is followed up by a guaranteed hit.

I think it was hit on earlier in the thread but... I'm pretty sure the lowering population numbers are due to the lack of new content (it was what, 6+ months between Page 5 release and I27 going to open beta?) and not so much the ease of leveling and building new characters. Hell, that second point is a plus to me and it's one of the biggest reasons I haven't seriously played on any of the other servers.

Apparently modifying the existing zones requires a non-trivial amount of under-the-hood work.

Scrapper in this situation, Brutes don't get the full benefit of their higher damage cap with Shield Charge/Lightning Rod and the higher Scrapper damage modifiers make Against All Odds work way better on a Scrapper.

I think there are a few key differences between what is happening now and the Issue 13 changes (since I assume that's what you're talking about). Prior to the I13 changes PvPers had a list of "these are the things we think you should look at to help PvP in this game" and that list was largely ignored in favor of sweeping mechanics changes that were implemented with little to no feedback from the PvP community. At least with this round of changes 1) they're not drastically changing the way PvP works and 2) have been implemented due to direct dialog between the dev team and the PvP community. You keep saying "kickballers" as if that is a group of people that exist. You could break up the PvP community into zone PvPers and arena PvPers and that would be a more accurate representation but there's usually quite a bit of overlap between the two groups. I would expect zone PvP to become more active with these changes implemented since some of the really stupid stuff that can happen in zone is going to be curbed. Re: slows - yes, I'm pretty sure there's a broad consensus from the PvP community (both zone and arena) that movement slows are not anywhere as good as they used to be. That's a mechanics change though, and right now the changes we are getting are ones that require little to no powers tweaking. The general agreement right now seems to be something like "take what we can get for now and see what we can get done in the future." For what it's worth I don't like the Jaunt meta either. On the one hand, you can argue that everyone having an "oh shit" button raises the skill ceiling because it requires more coordination to take down a target but on the other hand you could argue that it lowers the skill ceiling because things like positioning no longer matter as much as they did. Given the current damage-centric meta though I don't think Jaunt is the worst thing in the world and it does have some limitations that prevent it from being too good. Having to give up Hasten in a build is a pretty big tradeoff too.

Doesn't matter anyways, accolades have worked below the level you earned them at for a long time now.

Right now one of the big things keeping a lot of people on one alignment or the other are the alignment powers, which will be swappable after this patch hits so I can go villain and keep the Call to Justice equivalent.

This also lowers the barrier for entry to those who are interested in trying out PvP, since zone PvP is usually the first place they'll experience it and it tends to be horribly unbalanced.