macskull

Kick and move on.

The defense got rolled into the toggle, but the scaling resist and DDR didn't, unfortunately.

Anecdotal, of course, but I do see plenty of "steamroll" or "kill-most" or "[insert difficulty that is not +0]" task forces forming on Excelsior. I think a lot of the QoL stuff is just because there's no need to keep a subscriber base locked into the grind to keep subscriptions going, and the P2W store does a pretty decent job at serving as an inf sink to keep AH prices low. Re: lower-level travel powers and such... when travel powers were still unlocked at level 14 you were basically shoehorned into taking a prerequisite power at some level between 6 and 12, and a travel power at 14. Getting to 14 and finally unlocking that travel power felt like an accomplishment, and there is something to be said about that sense of accomplishment, but when that accomplishment comes at the price of the everything before it feeling crappy, I'm not sure how much of an accomplishment it really is.

Sure, but they're claiming the game's moving toward "no challenge whatsoever," when that is demonstrably not the case. (That's also glossing over the fact that this game's never been challenging at a basic level once you understand how it works.)

Hello, it’s me, hard mode content

Not exactly on-topic but to be entirely fair heroes did have some pretty significant advantages in PvP for a long time. Between IOs, the I13 changes, and various other changes since then, that's basically gone away, but it wasn't entirely a fair fight for a long time.

That's because in an MMO context when someone says "holy trinity" they're almost certainly talking about tank/dps/heal. Also, for what it's worth, the difficulty system is only marginally effective at making things harder. If an 8-person team is steamrolling at +0 they will probably have an easy go of it even when raising the difficulty to +4. Task force and flashback settings can increase the challenge but if there's no tangible reward for utilizing those challenge settings people aren't going to use them. There's a reason hard mode content dumps extra rewards onto you, and sometimes even those are barely worth it. At the end of the day, this game is - and pretty much always has been - easy, which is also why it's so popular. The game attracts a playerbase that isn't looking for a challenge (which is also one of the reasons PvP never took off in this game). The people who want things to be harder are a vocal minority, but I think giving them what they want isn't a bad thing as long as that increased difficulty is optional. Hard mode settings do a great job of this, but PuG hard mode content isn't all that common because people simply don't want to deal with it.

I'm a little confused by the OP asserting they miss the holy trinity in this game when this game never had it to begin with. There was only one "healing" set in the game at launch and 20 years later you can say there's two, maybe three, but the healing from those sets has never been the primary draw from a gameplay standpoint. The basic combat mechanics of this game have been virtually unchanged since launch and they're so simplistic that stacking buffs and debuffs has made healing an afterthought since the get-go. "Healers" in this game are, and have always been, noob traps. Healing is an acceptable form of damage mitigation at lower levels where players don't have key powers, the slots for the powers they do have, or enough enhancements to fill those slots, but by the time you get out of the low 20s (especially now that higher-tier powers are available earlier) it's kind of unnecessary outside of niche content, and other support sets offer strong buff/debuff ability while also providing enough healing for those occasions where it's needed. Perhaps what OP is really missing is team diversity and an era where low-DPS buff and debuff characters had an actual role, and I think they might have a point there, but I would argue Issue 18 kind of blew the doors off team AT diversity once you were able to play any AT on either side. Prior to Issue 18 if I wanted to play a buff/debuff character blueside I would roll a Defender or Controller because those were my options, but once that barrier went away there wasn't really much of a reason for me to not simply roll a Corruptor. The same thing happened with Tankers and Brutes: Tankers were pretty much dead in the water compared to Brutes until Tankers got turbo-buffed, and now it's Brutes that lack identity.

I don't think it's using Scrapper numbers because the power is set up correctly to use the Stalker crit attributes. I think there's something wrong with how the power is executing. Fault uses two redirect powers: a cone power to deal damage, and a targeted AoE power to stun. I would guess what's happening is that activating Fault takes you out of hidden status before the redirect powers activate, which means Fault is always using unhidden crit chance. You could test this by getting an 8-person team together and seeing what that does to Fault's crit chances when hidden - if they go up as expected on a team, there's your answer.

There are no Stalker attacks that have a 50% crit chance when not hidden. Fault has standard Stalker AoE crit chances - a flat 50% when hidden and 10% base when unhidden (up to 31% depending on team size). EDIT: Okay, misunderstood the wording in the post. I played around on the test server for a while to see if I could duplicate this and what do you know? While hidden I hit 120 targets with Fault and got 9 crits for a crit rate of 7.50%. I only counted the targets which had damage dealt, not the ones which were stunned, because the effects are applied by separate redirects. I tried it again with Hide turned off and got 13 crits on 94 targets for a crit rate of 13.83%. The unhidden crit chance being higher than the expected 10% can be explained away by the small sample size, but unless I was extremely unlucky small sample size can't explain away the low crit rate while hidden. Even if I was generous and gave the hidden crit rate the same roughly 40% margin of error I got while not hidden I would still expect, on the low end, a crit rate four times higher than what I actually got. I don't see anything immediately wrong with the way the crit tags are displayed for the power on City of Data, so I wonder what's up with this one.

Storm does well solo when paired with powers which keep enemies in Storm Cell or Cat5, and does well on a Corruptor with those same caveats but it performs poorly on teams because it relies so heavily on location-based patches and DoTs to deliver its damage. On a team that's moving even somewhat quickly the setup time means you're often corpse blasting and are only getting a fraction of the potential damage from your nuke. It's a shame, I really wanted to like my Storm/FF Corruptor but it just feels so icky on teams.

Leveling pacts were apparently very broken. Post-shutdown they experimented with allowing up to 8(?) players in a single level pact but ended up disabling the system again entirely. Re; sidekicking and exemplaring, I don't miss that even a little bit. Your mentor gets teleported across the map? Have fun when those grey-conning mobs are suddenly 30 levels higher than you! Want to run a task force but don't have enough people in the native level range to support exemplaring the higher-level characters? Guess you're doing something else! Hit level 46? Better be ready for a deluge of "will you bridge for me?" tells!

That makes two of us, then.

To be fair a lot of people who play this game tend to get upset if they can't just stand in one place and mash buttons.

That's kinda why being in task force mode doesn't kick you from the team when you log out - it was designed to support a single team running content across multiple play sessions. Of course, that's not something that happened often, but luckily now even the longest content in the game (4* content with a PuG that doesn't know wtf they're doing) only takes a few hours.

I dunno, based on this thread I'd say most people don't even know the channel exists. It's also not in your chat windows by default which means people just aren't going to see it unless they want to (which isn't the case for LFG, help, or general chat).

2009 (which should tell you exactly how likely it is to get people to switch over to using it for AE farms).

Just double-checked ingame and PB does boost Acrobatics' hold protection for the roughly 15 seconds it's active.

You said "45% defense brings you to a point where most critters are at the 5% minimum," which is only really true if you count even-con or lower minions as "most critters." Yeah, my addition to your post makes things more complicated, but it's a pretty common thing to see "45% defense means mobs only have 5% chance to hit" around here, and then people get confused when they find out most things still have a >5% chance to hit.

Don't forget enemies also have accuracy multipliers based on relative level and rank, and accuracy is factored into the hit chance equation after the 5% minimum clamp, so unless you fight exclusively even-con or lower minions everything will actually have a greater than five percent chance to hit you, sometimes more than double that, and there's no amount of defense you can add to reduce that higher chance. Also also, in addition to making you immune to (resisted) -res debuffs, being above 100% pre-capped resistance will make you immune to damage debuffs.

So patrol XP, at least, functions the same way it did back on live. I'm also not aware of any "XP boost" that's been added post-shutdown either, unless you include the XP boosters but those are optional.

When you say "recharge enhancements" do you mean recharge SOs or generic recharge IOs?

CoD doesn’t show the hold protection as being unaffected by enhancements and buffs so it should in theory be affected by Power Boost, but if it is it would only be affected for the duration of PB. I’ll have to check in game to see whether that’s actually true, since I know PB does affect mez protection powers like Clear Mind.

Yeah, this cuts out most of the traveling you need to do - the only movement that should be required is to get to the zone of your choice and find the right mob. After that it's just going between your SG base's rez station and the entrance portal (and mine are close enough to each other than I can click the portal from the rez station), EDIT: Caught the edit from your second to last post - I have been using this method to get debt for accolades for a while now and I can't recall a time when I've zoned back in to find the mob that had been there earlier has despawned. It might be because I'm using PvP zones and those tend to be so empty that you're 1) the player who causes the map to be loaded in the first place, and 2) the only one in the zone so there aren't any other players around to mess with spawning/despawning.

I just did the exact thing I described this past weekend while burning patrol XP for the debt badge to get High Pain Threshold, so I know it works. I tend to use Siren's Call though, the middle of the map has plenty of packs of Warriors and Tsoo that are big enough to kill you quickly. Just to be super extra sure though, I logged in while typing out this post and hopped into Siren's Call. 90 yards from the blueside helicopter I found two +2 Warrior bosses that killed my Dominator in 6.21 seconds. Went to SG base, zoned back in right on top of the same mobs, and died in less than 7 seconds. Did it a third time and was dead within three seconds. Including load times, none of those die -> base -> zone -> die cycles took me longer than a minute, and I'm running the game on a 10 year old laptop that has horrendous load times. The reason I say it has to be a PvP zone (or trial zone like the Hive, Monster Island, or the Abyss) is because zones without SG base portals will drop you right where you left if you go back out through the entrance portal in your base, while zones with base portals will always drop you at the portal. EDIT: I do want to point out that I'm not opposed to your initial suggestion. More options are always good. I'm simply pointing out that you can burn unwanted patrol XP pretty quickly with methods that already exist as a stopgap until something like your suggestion is implemented.