macskull

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.

I had a thread on this topic last year, I'm sure there are some ideas in there worth exploring. It's not just that the set bonuses are crap, it's that the enhancement values themselves are also crap.

It's hard to misread a situation when you have firsthand knowledge of that situation - I don't think the poster you are replying to is the one misreading it. OP wasn't the first person to be driven away from these forums by the toxicity of a few users and they probably won't be the last, since the moderation team refuses to issue permanent bans to said users despite literal years of repeated behavior.

You could spend 20,000 posts on the topic and they still wouldn’t get it.

It is increasingly unlikely that getting CIT back in any form will happen. The most recent implementation of CIT that OP described was never going to make it to Homecoming because of the potential for ingame performance issues. It worked fine on a tiny server with only a few dozen concurrent players, but on a server with thousands it would likely cause some pretty big hiccups while pulling data. Either way it's a moot point, since most of the tools that interface directly with the game like that went away as a result of conditions of the NCSoft license agreement.

Yeah, most of the SG-base-related travel changes were pretty nice and having you come out in every zone at the portal location makes sense but there are a few zones where that change made things more clunky: Getting to the eastern end of Eden for the badges there used to be super fast because the Founders' Falls teleporter dumped you out right by the Eden gate. Now it dumps you in the plaza, and the Eden teleporter puts you by Woodsman so either way you've got to hoof it across an entire zone to get to your destination. I brought up that it didn't make much sense to put the SG portal in its current location in Eden because you can already get to that exact location with a quick LFG teleport, but apparently using LFG as fast travel "isn't the intention" so here we are. I used to level new alts in the Brickstown AE because it was out of the way and the base teleporter used to drop you relatively close to the AE building there (and was closer to the middle of the zone instead of a corner like it is now).

For a very brief period in 2019 the regular and superior versions were bucketed together. These days there's not much reason for the superiors to be on the market, but they are tradeable so shrug. Along the lines of what the OP is asking for - I don't see any reason why the winter packs shouldn't be 10 million all the time. The other servers that share Homecoming's codebase have them for 10 million. Or we could go back to the pre-Homecoming days and make super packs into rare drops from mobs again.

...which, again, is exactly what happens when you use an ally-affecting buff while moving. Hell, even some toggles work that way now - the VFX show up but the animation itself doesn't play at all if you're moving.

But this is exactly what they did when they removed rooting from almost every non-enemy-affecting click power a few years ago. They decided the jank was fine, or we wouldn't have got that change. EDIT: It seems like OP is either confused by which powers do and do not cause rooting (since several of the examples they gave are powers that do not root you), or it's actually the existence of activation times they are complaining about. Activation times aren't a huge issue on their own, but long activation times that also root you in place are way more problematic.

An NVMe SSD (or any type of storage, really) isn't going to improve your graphics performance or anything like that, if that's what you're looking for. At best it might result in miniscule improvements to launch and load times but that heavily depends on the rest of your system. If you're running an older system you're unlikely to see any noticeable system-wide improvements versus running a SATA SSD. If your concern is load times the single biggest factor there is your graphics settings. This game was pretty poorly optimized for contemporary hardware even near the tail end of its retail run in 2011-2012 and even now relies pretty heavily on outdated or deprecated libraries and APIs. TL;DR: as far as the game is concerned any even semi-modern storage solution will handle it just fine and it's the graphics settings that have the biggest effect on performance.

Ignoring them, they’re a complete non-threat if you keep your distance.

I would really rather see a better solution for the power than keeping it as-is especially since the power’s very existence in its current form is at least part of what is keeping MM pet mobility from getting buffed.

I don’t really give a shit, at least if I’m pugging and not trying to set any speed records. If you’re being an asshat I’ll let you come along for the ride and then kick you right before the end of the TF. If I’m just throwing together a team for something I literally do not care who brings what as long as everyone is being useful. I’ve had people refuse to join content because I told them to “bring whatever you want” as they couldn’t wrap their minds around how people could be successful without a particular team makeup.

Oh no, you’re not the target of what I was saying. You’re clearly self-aware enough to know that just running Group Fly and expecting the other 7 people to cater to you isn’t practical and makes you a poor teammate which is why you’re looking for an alternate solution. The target of my post is the handful of people who continue to think it’s okay to be intentionally disruptive because “other people can go turn it off.” For what it’s worth, the most recent dev argument I can recall against just requiring a token to enable Group Fly was that it would mean a user’s pets would no longer be affected by Group Fly… but it seems like a pretty straightforward solution to that is to have that token also grant an invisible AoE power which allows the owner’s pets to be affected by Group Fly. There’s already precedent for invisible own-pet-only AoE powers with all the pet set aura IOs.

Also before anyone gets all up in arms about this it’s worth pointing out that the one in Aeon, in particular, was intentionally designed to be skippable. I do wish they’d take a leaf out of the iTrials book and just… not play any of the cutscenes in a TF if everyone has the completion badge.

I ain’t gonna read this whole thread but I’ve seen enough posts, so… Sorry, Group Fly users. Expecting everyone else to go talk to an NPC (that you can’t talk to in TF mode) so that they aren’t affected by your power is textbook entitlement, right up there with indiscriminate knockback users and Team Teleporters.

This behavior was added after the NCSoft license agreement, once the "closed beta" servers moved under the Homecoming umbrella and were more widely opened up to people who weren't around before Homecoming. Why? Because the people who still have access to their characters from the live servers probably don't want to advertise that to players who will never be able to do the same, and because at that point people will realize that the "sorry, all your old characters are gone" line that they've been hearing the last five years isn't actually true.