macskull

That's always been the case.

So the powerset has some regen debuff resistance in Fast Healing but it has no -heal resistance at all. The reason it seems immune to -heal is because Reconstruction has a toxic resist component that is enhanceable. Because you can't make buffs selectively ignore portions of a power you have two choices: make buffs apply to all aspects of the power (in which case popping a bunch of reds would raise the amount of toxic resist Reconstruction gives you) or make buffs apply to no aspects of the power (the +res is unaffected by damage buffs but the heal can't be changed by +/-heal). Cold Dom shields work the same way - they grant defense and resistance but the resistance is enhanceable so things like Power Boost don't affect the +def granted.

Your third point (regen being immune to -heal): I assume you're talking about the regen mechanic and not the powerset so this one is easy enough. Regeneration debuff resistance is a thing that some powersets get and it's different from heal resistance. Even though absorb, heal, and regen powers accept the same type of enhancements, they're three separate mechanics that don't affect each other. Heal resistance does exist but it's yet another combat attribute you can't see because until Incandescence and Field Medic came along there were three (I think) powers in the game that could affect it. It's how old MoG made you unable to heal at all during its duration. All players and NPCs have a base 0% heal resistance. T1 Incandescence gives you -30% res(heal) - in other words all unresistible heals (Aid Self, heals from allies, and green insps) will be 30% more effective when used on you. Elusivity is only granted for the damage type(s) or position(s) a power gives defense against in PvE. So for your example, Scorpion Shield gives defense against all damage types in PvP but elusivity against smash/lethal/energy only. EDIT: The point about Scrapper or Stalker crit chance - there's an "inherent" attribute in base attributes that you can monitor but unless you're a Brute, Dominator, or Sentinel it doesn't actually do anything because it looks at the value of the "inherent" bar under your HP/end bars. It could probably be retooled to display crit chance but standard code rant applies here. EDIT EDIT: More on heal and regen. As a bit of background, most attributes (healing, regen, resistance, damage, defense) have two ways of being expressed: strength (str), or the actual change in an attribute's value, and resistance (res), or the resistance a character has to things that buff or debuff that attribute. For most attributes str is the only one that matters - damage buffs and debuffs (and even damage enhancements in powers) are +/- str(damage). Damage resistance resists changes in your damage output, both buffs and debuffs, so it's necessary to flag damage buffs as unresisted otherwise you wouldn't get the full effect of the buff if you had any damage resistance at all. Defense works the same way - sort of. Defense buffs and debuffs, including enhancemenst, are +/- str(defense). However, some powers that give defense also give defense debuff resistance, which is +res(defense). Just like damage buffs, defense buffs have to be flagged as unresisted otherwise characters with DDR would get less from those buffs. So finally onto heal and regen. There's +/- str(regen) and +/-res(regen) - regen buffs and debuffs affect str(regen) and are resisted by res(regen). Healing works the same way: +/- str(heal) affects the value of your heals and +/- res(heal) affects the amount you can be healed by a given heal.

Aid Self is the power that's not working correctly here (I'd assume), not the PB heals, since every other self-heal or self-max-HP power is the same way.

That's actually a massive global buff to every single character so if your argument is coming from a place of "Hasten is too good!" your argument makes no sense.

Depends if you're looking for zone, 1v1, or team arena. Poison, Rad, Therm, and Cold can work depending on the situation.

For the most part, the Blaster "sustain" powers aren't that weird. The only oddballs that come to mind are Elec and Dark because they were shoehorned into existing attacks instead of toggles or click powers (and the one from Dark is tied to a power that most people probably skipped - but hey, in that case there's suddenly important utility in an often-skipped power and you can't seriously argue that's a bad thing). The rest of the Blaster "sustain" powers are only weird if you think a damage aura can only deal damage and nothing else. The power got renamed and its new name and description thematically fit the function of the power. There's nothing weird there. If you start going around changing the base characteristics of powers or outright replacing them with new ones you end up with two problems right from the gate: Players that had a use for the old power are now left to find an alternative which may or may not exist Essentially forcing every player with that power to respec their character which might potentially include completely rebuilding them due to the loss of utility, set bonuses, etc. There are plenty of examples of changes that completely overhauled the feel or functionality of a power without changing what the power did at its core. One of the biggest is Moment of Glory - old-style you had a whole bunch of defense and resistance but your HP dropped to a very low value and you couldn't be healed or regenerate, so you had to gamble on whether you'd actually survive its duration. The current version is a short-duration defense and resistance buff that doesn't affect your HP - the functionality and feel of the power changed drastically but its core did not - it still dramatically boosts your defense and resistance. Look at Energize from Elec and Energy Aura - used to be Conserve Power but the lack of a self-heal hurt those sets so a heal and +regen was added to the existing end discount. Core ability remains the same, power does extra things that make it better. Dominator Power Boost (all flavors) got changed to Power Up - it still does +special, albeit a little less than before, but it also provides a meaningful damage boost. My point? It is possible to significantly change an existing power and give it more functionality without replacing it. Your premise is flawed from the start - AR doesn't need Aim, there are several other ranged damage sets that don't have it, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility to add an Aim-like effect to an already-existing power in the set. Look at the Devices secondary - no Build Up but Targeting Drone provides both a constant damage bonus and a larger damage bonus for the first attack when entering combat. Going back to AR, though, let's say we decide it doesn't really need an Aim-like effect added to an existing power. If our concern is really that AR lacks a tier 3 attack, the most obvious candidate is Beanbag. Raise its range to 80, give it tier 3-level damage, and adjust its recharge time and endurance cost accordingly. Boom, you've given AR a tier 3 attack without removing the core functionality of the existing power. I'm not going to argue about Ignite being bad - it really is, but a large portion of why is because its animation time is absolute garbage. Reduce the animation time and boom, you've automatically made Ignite more appealing. I do want to revisit the "Cauterizing Aura levels of weirdness" bit though - this is a superhero game. I can magically grow my arm on a 4-foot-high character to hit a target thirteen feet away with Knockout Blow, I can smack around bad guys with a railroad crossing sign, and I can shoot laser beams out of my eyes. Is it really that far-fetched to think that I could surround myself with flames and deal damage to nearby enemies and also heal myself at the same time?

No, but it would make it less fun.

You picked a particularly bad example because there are already multiple ranged sets with T3 blasts that also mez (Beam, Dark on Blasters, Ice, Rad, and potentially Psi) and the situation you're describing (take a CC power with token damage and turn it into a powerful attack coupled with CC) is exactly what happened to Clobber, Freeze Ray, Taser, Toxic Web Grenade, and probably other powers I can't remember right now. The "cottage rule" doesn't mean things can't be changed, but rather the core functionality of a power shouldn't be removed as part of a change, and in some cases it might be necessary to do even that if it's deemed a big enough deal (the most recent example I can think of is in the Presence pool where Challenge got replaced with Pacify, because why would a power pool need two taunt powers). One common suggestion I've seen recently is "replace melee AT Instant Healing with Sentinel Instant Regeneration!" but... those two powers are not at all alike. One's a click +regen power with a long cooldown and the other is a toggle "absorb over time" power. Is IH objectively worse than IR? Yeah, probably, but you can make IH better without outright changing what it does (make it a toggle again but with reduced +regen value, shorten its cooldown, add secondary effects to it, etc.).

There's a few: Animation time is awful Recharge time makes them of extremely limited utility The command lets you create as many macros as you can fit in your trays, each with a unique passcode - the base TP power requires you to type in the passcode each time so you have to keep a list of passcodes somewhere else Basically there's no reason for any of the location TP powers (base, mission, Pocket D, Wentworths/Black Market) to be such utter trash when something like Ouroboros Portal exists. Seriously, it's non-interruptible, has a quick cast time, can be clicked by anyone, and has a fast recharge. That should be a model for any adjustments to the existing location TP powers.

The "Excelsior" global channel is usually pretty busy and isn't full of the, we'll say... questionable things that show up in /z sometimes. Just type: /chanjoin Excelsior into your chatbox and meet hot singles in your area! ...Wait, maybe not that last part.

For what it's worth, projectile speed is already an individually-defined (and adjustable via code changes) value for every ranged attack in the game that involves projectiles.

Non-Stalkers/Soldiers/Widows have a stealth cap of 571.5 feet at level 50 and all non-Soldiers/Widows have a perception cap of 1153 at level 50, so even at stealth cap someone at the perception cap can see you from 581.5 feet away. If your target had no perception you would be effectively invisible (until you attacked) but almost every PvP build will have at least some perception which means at the stealth cap you'll still likely be seen from a few hundred feet away.

Team level is based on the level of the team leader, not the level of the active mission (unless you're on a task force or flashback in which case you're not inviting people to your team). If you're level 24 and a level 50 joins, just pass the star to the 50.

In fact, AE content doesn't count toward any badges that aren't AE-specific. Damage dealt, damage taken, mez, healing, inf gain, none of it counts.

Other servers have Guardians (Assault/Support with some modifications) and they're pretty reasonable. Too bad we got Sentinels instead...

Cold was originally a Corruptor set and the pseudopet debuffs (Sleet and Heat Loss, really) didn't get adjusted when the set got ported to Defenders in Issue 12 and Masterminds on the private server. Pseudopets have generally ignored AT modifiers since the beginning of time but it's something the HC dev team is starting to turn their attention to (non-Defender Dark Miasma/Affinity got nerfed with the page 5 update because of this). The concern at this point is whether the Defender version is going to get adjusted upward as it should be or if everything else is going to get adjusted downward as will probably happen.

Impale's animation is bad and its range is too low to be useful and Throw Spines' proc rate is not good because it's an AoE. Basically if you're running a melee on an 8v8 team it's either a Stalker for burst damage or a Brute/Tanker for disruption. There's not much reason to run any melee set besides SS.

Recharge and mez resistance function differently than other enhanceable attributes - if I have a power that does 100 damage base and I enhance it with a damage SO that with an enhancement value of 33%, it enhances that power by (100x1.33=133). Recharge and mez resistance are functionally the opposite - 100% recharge doesn't make a power recharge instantly and 100% mez resistance doesn't make mez have no effect, those values simply cut the original value in half. Enhancement diversification isn't really a "soft cap" in that enhancement beyond that value is useless, but it does become subject to diminishing returns to the point where slotting any more than three identical SO's worth of an attribute into a power isn't usually worth the slots (although you do still get some value out of the slot). The only mechanic that really has a "soft cap" is defense since combat mechanics mean that for most cases anything above 45% defense is wasted.

To clarify on the defense softcap thing, reiterating a few things OP might have missed in their link: Since the base mob chance to hit is 50%, and the minimum chance to hit is never lower than 5%, any defense over 45% is functionally useless except in the case of enemy defense debuffs (somewhat common) or tohit buffs (far less common outside of incarnate content). That being said, higher-level and higher-rank mobs get an accuracy bonus, which isn't countered by defense so in reality unless you spend your time exclusively fighting even-con or lower minions you will never actually see that 5% minimum. Extra resistance past the hardcap isn't necessarily wasted, since it does work like defense past the cap in that it can provide a buffer for resistance debuffs.

what the fuck

His Channelgun attack has some pretty serious -end/-recovery and it'll catch you with your pants down if you're not expecting it. He's had that attack since the TF was added to the game, so maybe you've gotten lucky.

I'm not going to quote everything you said point-by-point because a lot of what you're saying is wrong: If you think you can build for meaningful psi resist while still hitting the other requirements for a PvP build you're woefully unfamiliar with building characters for PvP The current 8v8 AT limit isn't solely due to Blasters, it also stops people from running wacky things like teams full of Tanks/Brutes/Stalkers/Masterminds Scourge has never been unresisted outside of PvP I feel like your discussion about spikes/countdowns is coming from somewhere other than team arena matches which doesn't make sense because that's pretty much the only place those happen and none of the points you raised make sense anyways There are several different types of PvP in this game - 1v1, team arena matches, zone... 1v1s have always been rock/paper/scissors and the very nature of zone PvP makes it impossible to balance so that pretty much leaves team arena matches. Good balance should promote and revolve around teamwork because this is (and has always been) a team-oriented game, both in PvE and PvP Until options to disable travel suppression and heal decay in the arena were added (I think it was I15?) the only way to turn those off was to turn off diminishing returns which resulted in the situation I described It's time for a reality check here. I'll restate what I said earlier - most PvPers would probably prefer to go back to the old system but it's not going to happen here because it would be a huge chunk of developer time and resources for little overall benefit. Even when PvP was at its peak the PvP population made up a small fraction of the game's subscriber base and it's probably even smaller now. This game has never catered to PvPers and the casual-friendly nature of the game as a whole means most players just aren't interested in PvP in the first place. It makes no sense from a development standpoint to overhaul the PvP system when there is no guarantee of benefit and when most development efforts are focused around retaining the playerbase the game already has. That being said, the I25 code base is out there - if you're really interested in this being a thing and you have some coding knowledge and time on your hands, go wild. I'm out, enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Enhancements also scale down in effectiveness when you exemplar below level 32, as described in the PW article here (because the game doesn't track when you placed slots, just powers). Set bonuses will also not work more than 3 levels below the level of the IOs in question (i.e. level 50 IO set bonuses stop working below 47) unless they're attuned, PvP, or purple sets.

BACKGROUND Currently, the Combat chat tab contains the following channels by default: Combat warnings Damage inflicted Hit rolls General combat Damage received Error Healing received Healing delivered Additionally there are other, mostly pet-related channels that can be viewed as well, namely damage inflicted/received, healing delivered/received, hit rolls, and combat. PROBLEM The existing channels are fine most of the time but there are obvious issues given the lack of channels, specifically for endurance, and also for some procs, and it seems like the healing delivered channel is basically used as a "catch-all" for items that should be in the general combat channel. For example, for powers which drain enemy endurance show that end drain in the damage inflicted channel, making it more difficult to parse out. Powers which drain your own endurance (Hasten, T9 crashes, etc.) show up in the damage received channel. Likewise, powers which boost your endurance or that of your allies show up in the healing received and healing delivered channels. For example, the +end from Performance Shifter and Panacea show up in the healing channels, and the Theft of Essence +end proc works the same way. When I activate Build Up or a similar power, the combat text shows up in the healing received channel instead of the general combat channel. SOLUTION Add combat channels for endurance delivered and endurance received (and parallel pet-related channels) and ensure powers that aren't actually delivering heals or +regen have their combat messages placed in the general combat channel instead of the healing channels. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk!