macskull

In other words: "I don't enjoy the aspect of the game that you like so it should be removed." That, folks, tells you all you need to know about the OP's intentions.

You want to go into a PvP zone and not engage in PvP, thus foiling the PvPer from accomplishing their goal of fighting and defeating other players. By your own definition you are the griefer.

Again - and I'm beating a dead horse here - being attacked by other players in a player vs. player zone is not griefing.

Siren's Call used to be the PvP zone. The issue 13 changes significantly reduced the population, the issue 16 changes to exemplaring (keeping powers 5 levels above you instead of 0) drove most of the remaining players away, and now on Homecoming the PvP population isn't really large enough to be active in multiple zones at the same time. It has nothing to do with the bounty system. Also, of course there is no way to enter a PvP zone and not be flagged for PvP. That would go against the entire purpose of the zone's existence. You have two options with regard to PvP zones: enter them and risk being attacked by other players, or don't enter them. If you choose to enter a PvP zone to engage in non-PvP content, despite the numerous warnings telling you that you are indeed entering a PvP zone and can be attacked by other players, that is your own decision.

So maybe PvP zones and the content in them aren't for you. I think at this point it's best to leave it at that instead of trying to change them for the worse. Some of your ideas in the OP have merit (specifically rewards if you already have a rocket/shivan temp) but the rest of your suggestions show you don't understand PvP and would rather everyone else be dragged down to your level. That's how we got Issue 13. EDIT: Also, the only PvP zone that's routinely active is Recluse's Victory on Indomitable. Any of the other zones are mostly empty to the point you can go in knowing there won't be any players there. The risk is tiny at worst.

You're intentionally and willingly entering a zone that has PvP as its primary purpose and you're complaining about being attacked by other players. Heck, you're even greeted after zoning with a dialog box that says something along the lines of "You are now entering a PvP zone and may be attacked by other players."

/jranger

So it looks like what is happening here isn't Power Boost stacking, since that would be shown as a linear increase in defense and heal bonus with each cast (i.e. you'd see heal bonus go up by 78.67 each time). It seems like Power Boost is boosting the already boosted values though, by the percentage boost Power Boost is supposed to give. The math works out like this: Initial boost: 78.672 Next boost: 78.672 * (1 + 0.78672) = 140.5648 Third boost: 78.672 * (1 + 1.405648) = 189.2572 ...and so on. The reason you see defense stop going up while the healing bonus keeps going up is because the way that math works out, you're seeing a smaller and smaller increase with every cast, but the absolute change per cast for heal bonus is high enough where it'd take 44 casts of Power Boost before combat attributes would stop showing a change. The defense bonus follows similar math as shown above but only applies to the defense granted from Weave and Combat Jumping (3.5% and 1.75% defense base, respectively).

I suppose I should directly respond to the OP as well... Nothing at any point ever has stopped a player from playing whatever powerset combination they want, picking whatever powers they want, and slotting (or not) those powers the way they want. Some combinations, power picks, and ways of enhancing those powers are going to be better than others, and some powersets and combinations are objectively bad. I'm not here to sugarcoat things for a new player. The example OP gave was someone saying something along the lines of "whatever you do, don't play Energy Melee, that set is awful." If I were giving advice to a new player on what power sets they should look at, I certainly wouldn't recommend it, and I'd probably discourage them from picking it, unless they liked the idea of it. I'd probably say something like "that set isn't very good and there are better options but if you wanna go for it, it's fine." I don't give two shits about character concept, but I understand there are players that do, so I won't tell them "that set is awful so you should rework your concept around a different set." I might ask "why not these sets or this power?" and if their response is character concept, then I shrug and help them anyways. Also, god help us that people complain about something in a game. Using the "this is free and supported by volunteer efforts" as a reason why no one should be complaining is a shitty cop-out.

TL;DR version: OP complaining about people saying powersets are weak/underpowered/whatever and would prefer people in-game just pretended that all powersets are good.

"Signature" task/strike forces will always spawn enemies at the max level range of the task/strike force, regardless of the actual level of the team. Most task forces aren't classified this way, but every strike force is.

I'm like 90% sure that's just a demorecord with alternate Super Strength animations.

Task forces will lock at the level you were when you started.

What are your combat logs saying when you try to activate the power? I've noticed this happen with Tornado where the game will tell me the target is out of range despite practically standing on top of the target.

The reality is with the Assassin's Focus/out-of-hide AS changes from Issue 22, every Stalker is capable of good single-target damage, and that goes double with the re-hide ATO proc. At that point the sets with no or poor AoE have overkill single-target damage and nothing to help out otherwise. It seems a conscious design decision that any of the sets that were ported to Stalkers after the original sets didn't really give up that much (or any) AoE. I've seen it stated this way in a few other threads, but as far as the "melee ATs are stepping on each others' toes!" argument... not so much. Especially now with the Tanker changes, each melee AT has its own "flavor" and Stalkers are still very much different than Scrappers if only because they can get far more control over when and how they crit. The damage/survivability relationship is right where it should be right now: Stalkers deal more damage than Scrappers deal more damage than Brutes deal more damage than Tankers, and Tankers are more survivable than Brutes are more survivable than Scrappers are more survivable than Stalkers. That sentence may be a grammatical trainwreck, but it's true.

Adrenal booster boosts defense debuffs but not defense buffs. It's not intuitive but them's the breaks.

There's also the myriad of powers that have a "chance for" secondary effects (stun, sleep, etc.). Knockback/down isn't unique in this regard. Also, all Elec Blast/Elec Melee powers that drain end do so 100% of the time.

Err, what?

The concept of diminishing returns isn't too hard to understand, but the application of it is next to impossible unless you know the math and what attributes scale in what way on what AT. Even the in-game combat attributes don't correctly reflect DR for some things (recharge and damage are the two big offenders but there are several more). As an example, given 45% defense in PvE, that will DR to about 33% for melee ATs, 18.26% for all ranged ATs (including Sentinels, which means defense-based Sentinel builds get really hosed), and about 28% for Warshades (yes, they have their own DR curves for defense and resistance for some strange reason). Tohit DR's at the same rate for all ATs, and it follows the same curve as ranged AT defense. Also worth noting, accuracy bonuses apply after the 5% clamp in PvE as well. 45% defense is thrown around as a magic number because in the absence of enemy tohit buffs anything over that is "useless" but in reality even with 45%+ defense you're going to see most enemies will have hit chances above 5%, sometimes as high as 10.5% - and there's nothing you can do to make that any lower. Enemies get acc bonuses based on their rank and relative level to you, which is a way of ensuring defense isn't too good - as you fight higher-level or higher-rank enemies your 45% defense isn't as effective as it would be against lower-level/rank enemies. So, I guess, to answer the OP's question of "are player defenses too high?" - no, I don't think so, and the game already has a mechanism in place to ensure defense is less powerful when you're fighting more difficult enemies.

It is extremely hard to guarantee a 5% chance for another player to hit you - you likely couldn't get your defenses high enough, and accuracy is applied after the 5% clamp. If the enemy player had no acc slotted, no acc bonuses, and no sources of tohit, and you had 45% defense, your opponent would have a 5% chance to hit you. That being said, in order to actually get to 45% defense in PvP you'd need to have 77% defense in PvE because of diminishing returns. This is pretty much unattainable without either outside buffs or being in Elude, Overload, Retsu, or whatever other defense-based T9 you could be running. So here's where we are so far: You need 77% defense pre-DR to get to 45% defense in PvP. 45% is only a magic number if your opponent has no accuracy slotted in their attacks, no global acc bonus, and no sources of tohit. So let's figure out accuracy and tohit and how that'll work into the equation, but this discussion is going to be hypothetical since there are a myriad of ways powers can be slotted, some powers have a higher base accuracy, etc. We'll start with tohit, and we'll assume that the attacker is a Blaster running ED-capped Tactics (10% base, enhanced to about 16%) and a Kismet IO (6%). That's a total of about 22% tohit, which after factoring in diminishing returns gives us about 16%. With that 16% extra tohit you now need 61% defense (45+16) to keep your attacker's chance to hit at 5%. Not bad, right? Well.. to hit 61% defense after diminishing returns you'd need roughly 245% defense pre-DR, which is possible but you'd need a team of buffers or several T4 purple inspirations to get there. "But that's above the hard cap," you're saying, and you're right, but the game continues to calculate values past the hard cap and applies DR to that value. So here's where we are with some tohit in the mix: If your target has 16% tohit after DR, you need to add an extra 16% defense on top of the 45% you already have. In order to get there, you'd need to go to extreme lengths so it isn't practical for anything other than a minute or two here or there. Now we'll move on to accuracy. The PvP formula for chance to hit is this: HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × (1 - TargetElusivity) × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) where AccMods = the power's inherent Accuracy × (1.0 + the power's Accuracy Enhancements + all global Set Accuracy bonuses) As an SR character you get 10% elusivity in your defense toggles (but no extra in Elude). We will assume, for our purposes here, that your attacker has slotted 66% acc into their attacks and has 50% global acc bonus. I picked those numbers as reasonable guesses because most PvP-centric builds will build for enough acc to get 95% hit rolls against a ranged AT with a small amount of defense, and those acc numbers will make that happen. With that combination of tohit, acc slotting, and global acc bonus, your attacker will end up with a 9.72% chance to hit you. If you decided that you couldn't make 61% defense and stuck it out with 45%, your attacker would have a 40.82% chance to hit you.

EA already outperforms SR because it gets almost as much defense, some decent resistance right out of the gate, and Overload gives extra elusivity (it is the only t9 that does this). EDIT: There's also a balance aspect to defense in PvP, and between elusivity and diminishing returns I don't think it's in a terrible spot. Elusivity values could probably use a bit of tweaking - they're currently at 10% and I think they were originally at 20% or 30% when I13 dropped and it made defense-based builds way too good. You can't just have so much defense that you completely floor your opponent's chance to hit because at that point you're basically unkillable, but anything less feels weak to the player with the defense-based build.

Defense in PvP has the unique problem of being at the mercy of luck far more than resist-based or regen/heal-based builds.. Someone playing a resist-based build knows they're probably going to get hit most or all of the time but they'll reduce that incoming damage by a fixed amount. With a defense-based character, your attacker could have a 40% chance to hit you and get lucky four times in a row, or they could whiff all four times. It isn't as reliable a form of mitigation as resistance/regen/heal/absorb in PvP because unlike in PvE your opponents are going to have lots of acc and tohit bonuses. That being said, elusivity does make a pretty noticeable difference, and the effective DR cap on tohit bonuses for any AT is way lower than the effective DR cap on defense for melee ATs.

Blast from the past here but... you can activate AD while you're mezzed and since toggle dropping hasn't been a thing since Issue 13 you're probably going to be fine.

It seems like the "how often are you off the ground though?" camp has never run missions in caves, where all the geometric oddities make the game think you're off the ground way more often than you actually are. Building for extra knockback protection can be done, sure, but that brings up two problems: if you build for additional knockback protection for while you're not on the ground, it will be redundant while you are on the ground, and you're now spending three or four slots on knockback protection that only a few other sets have to deal with (except theirs isn't made redundant by whether they happen to be on the ground or not). Or maybe you get Acrobatics, but that still means you need another 1 or 2 -KB IOs to match the protection you're getting from Grounded, and you have to invest three power picks to get there. That might be fine in later builds, but early on you're getting Grounded at level 16 (8 on a Tanker) and you don't have the power picks to devote to Acrobatics unless you want to seriously skimp on your primary and secondary.

Oh, with context this makes more sense.