OverkillEngine

Well crap, guess I need to dust off that alt a bit more often lol. It's been a bit since I played them. Yeah that's why I floated the idea of making it into an alternate "spender" of Insight to get that as bonus. The tradeoff being you have spent the Insight you could have used on GPB instead. Makes it an on demand sidegrade for the set instead of a straight upgrade.

Or the inverse, all swords. Really need this treatment across all the energy/elemental melee sets. Edit: Had a chance to copy a mid-level Psi/Will Brute over to test and I can largely concur with this: The set flows MUCH better now, though I am going to dissent and bit and say I'd like Psi Blade Sweep to better match the flavor text and be a very wide wide, if shallow cone. Right now it has the Shadow Maul issue where you may as well regard it as a single target attack with *maybe* a chance of hitting extra targets unless you pack the enemies especially deep and their anti clumping code doesn't screw you. Maybe that could be a function of Insight boosting it? Then you have to choose between holding Insight for dot, spending Insight for better AoE, or spending Insight for better single target burst. The highlight rings were appreciated as a mechanical aid that did not distract me from anything that I was already needing to pay attention to; way better than looking for INSIGHT clear up in the corner of my screen, or having to pick out the boggle sfx in a seat of sfx.

To add on: Another reason to do the generic IO's starting at 22 is you no longer have to mess with updating those until you want to update them; saves a lot of time and inf in the long run, though a full set of generic IO's at 22 can easily run 2.5-4+ million inf or so depending on materials prices and the specific enhancements. Just something to keep in mind if you ever make an alt. And puts them in net inf gain just from drops from that point onward if you want to run 2x XP buffs all the way to 50. Selling a piece of rare salvage here and there will easily cover the cost of any slots that open up along the way. Granted, not really necessary depending on how you are leveling that character. If they are door sitting, they don't really need enhancements until you are ready to play them.

Tried out the changes on a lvl 50 barely IO'd Ice melee/Fiery Armor Brute. (mainly just a mag 4 KB protection bonus and a few other misc other bonuses). Piddlefarted around in a lvl 50 Praetorian mission chain at various multipliers. The changes to Burn allowed me to get enough -KB to drop Acrobatics, which was nice because it is flipping expensive to run. The changes to Consume allowed me to attack more aggressively as it was easier to get endurance on demand. Though I think I'd rather have scaling +res instead of scaling +max HP, as that would keep you alive better until the next cycle of Healing flames and to be honest, the set overall is squish AF outside of cherrypicked content if you aren't running either Fighting Pool or are not an IO'd out nepo fire farm baby. The goatse-tier Psi hole wasn't helping when facing Praetorian content either. The set shouldn't feel so abjectly dependent on outside pools and enhancements to function.

Yup, once I read that particular aspect to UM, it led to me deciding to drop certain pool attacks that I used to sub in for the lower tier SS powerset attacks.

Just had a chance to copy my Elec/SS Brute to Brainstorm for some testing; respecced into the new Unleashed Might and dropped some pool powers that I no longer needed. Loving not having to plan around a crash or getting nailed with -recharge debuffs that mess up the timing. Made certain aspects of character building and play much less irritating even if performance peaks are no longer as "optimal". Turning Hurl into a railgun/narrow cone resulted in me being willing to use it a bit more often even though the animation time is butts. Anything over 2 seconds is an eternity in current gameplay and should result in a significant outcome of some sort like a host of angels descending to serve me perfectly done steak and BJ's. Some hyperbole may apply. Main pain point I found in the new Hand Clap is that when in "cone mode", its targeting is still treated as if it were a PBAOE. I really wish it were at that point treated like a traditional cone where it requires a target and autofaces you at the target before executing. If that is at all possible.

I take a break and of course ya'll come out with some absolutely beautiful beta patch notes. Any chance we can in the future get All Swords and No Swords options across both Fiery and Ice Melee? I'm so close. I'll even take alternate exclusive powers if the animations can't be balanced 1:1. Otherwise I'm going to need a Blue Balls costume option to be added. Edit: I love that the game is being actively developed, helps keep it interesting far better than treating it like a Museum/Sacred Shrine where any changes are automatically blasphemy.

Did we just have another patch past build 6?

Related to this, I often find my self wishing that enhancement sets had more enhancement types to choose from. Lot of other powers across AT's have cases like this where they can slot a set, but only a few of the available enhancements in that set are worth slotting for anything other than set bonuses. Which forces a frankenslotting meta if one wants to 6 slot a power to enhance its base values. But that's more a general invention system issue than something specific to MM's.

Just got done taking a Sonic/Inv Brute for a spin on test. No hard metrics measured, just did a mission at every 5th level using basic SO or IO's only. Attune takes a little bit to get used to, but it does output some decent animation free DPS after the initial setup so long as you have both Strident Echo and Sonic Thrust. Feels wasteful to use it on anything less than an Lt, though at least it recharges fast if you use it to obliterate a minion at the start of a fight. Tentative thumbs up. The only time the toggle nature of it made me upset was when I was doing content in the 10-15 bracket and was running into Lost Rectors that could chain mezz, which neuters offensive toggles if you don't have status protection yet, which I did not have access to until 16. Nor did I have a reliable way to lock them down with status effects. Those were some close fights even after eating inspirations like candy. Sonic Clap was nicer than I expected. I know some people hate having mixed cones and PBOE's in melee sets, but this power has a pretty generous cone arc and range. It's right in the sweet spot, at most I had to take a short step back or to a side to easily hit nearly everything already in melee with me. You could port a pure smashing version of this to Super Strength and I'd be pretty happy, hint, hint. Sound Booster is the usual Build Up analogue. Functional. No complaints. I skipped Sandman's Whisper since my single target chain was adequate enough for my purposes at the time and a low mag single target standard sleep isn't exactly useful to me as anything it would affect out of the box I could already easily obliterate (minion/Lt), and I had nothing else in the set to stack it with. So I had no room for a power that was going to be docked on the total power budget due to a weak status component. Ah well, not every power in a set has to be a must-pick. Speaking of status stacking, Deafening Wave and Earsplitter having matching (useful) status effects that could be boosted was appreciated. Though one thing that annoyed me about Deafening Wave is when it hits multiple targets, the resulting sound effect is VERY similar to the sound of armor toggles dropping due to lack of endurance - please do not do that. It's a very disconcerting sound to hear when I am hip deep in a fight. Please consider some SFX polish here. For doing regular content at least the set feels alright overall, has decent ST damage and enough AoE to whittle packs down at a decent rate especially with the -res secondary effect. It is however busy enough that I would probably only pair it with a hands-off secondary that doesn't require micro.

Yeah the pet teleport to master leash being shorter, *if* it could be tweaked, would help mitigate multiple issues in one swoop. Pet pathing in general *and* keeping up with fast teams. And god help you if you have a "slow" secondary like Traps, you are basically naked at that point. Edit: if the player could influence the leash range on the fly via the stance commands that would be even better, like have passive enforce the shortest leash, defensive the second shortest, and aggressive the longest.

Dang jerk hackers have gone to the Americans!

I just wanted to echo again the advice of setting reputation difficulty to -1, especially on squishier AT's that take a while to come online when it comes to soloing. Experience and mobs are not a finite resource. You are not obligated in any way shape or form to fight yellow and orange con mobs if your build has a hard time with those. You are not required to fight bosses when solo. The most important metric is xp/time, not xp/kill. The latter would only be the most important if you were only issued so many mobs that you were allowed to defeat, ever, per character. Luckily, that is not the case and you can always go hunt more Skuls. Fighting the mobs that your build can handle at a good clip is how you maximize xp/time. Edit: now one thing to take into account is some enemy groups are harder than others on a 1:1 basis, but they tend to award more xp/kill in exchange. You see this crop up fairly often in villain/praetorian content. You may want to pick your missions more wisely if those groups are too much.

In lieu of an actual systemic fix to perception and pathfinding, just have entering an escort mission grant a temp version of Assemble the Team and make sure all escort NPC's are valid targets for it once they've been flagged as "rescued" from their initial spawn location.

Additionally, alter KB to have a scaling damage proc based on magnitude and character level and maybe then KB enhancements might no longer be seen as incredibly suboptimal most of the time. KU/KD would add no extra damage but also not disturb AoE centric strategies. KB would be the spec for juggling enemies to death.

I still take it on even non-flying SS characters. It's fast animating, has a useful status effect, recharges fast, and while not the greatest DPE in the world, under the effects of Rage it is "good enough". You can cycle Punch and AS with the occasional KOB woven in for a serviceable single target chain that is complete "enough" early on with minimal recharge slotting or boosts. And it looks cool as hell too.

And even within the minmaxers, there is variance that comes up every time there is an argument about power variations that are cones in some sets but pbaoes in others. Neither is necessarily wrong per se. Those power formats are simply optimized for different situations and play-styles.

Haha someone is an optimist to the point of naivety. This sort of thing has been attempted on other forums in the past to great failure. See: 10chars. The responses won't be any less one note for having forced people to type them out. And you don't get to determine if they feel like replying or not, so maybe drop that particular hubris. See: /jranger But...I like pizza with both, and with ham, bacon, onion, and bell and jalapeno peppers too. And Parmesan to make the cheese flavor moar pungent. Sweet, sour, salty, spicy and umami flavors locked in a post apocalyptic cage match to determine WHO RUNS PIZZA TOWN?!

I'd take a crashless version with a lower bonus in a heartbeat just to not have to deal with the mandatory break time abortion of a concept for balancing every couple minutes. And just because we *can* build our way around it with proc bombing and rage stacking doesn't mean we should have to.

How very glib...

[Semi related since this has to do with powerset proliferation too] Given that a good chunk of any needed work for Ninjitsu for Tanks/Brutes has already been done to get it ported to Scrappers:

The core problem is that intangibility sucks major donkey balls as a mechanic unless it both reliable and under complete control of the player from second to second, since it inherently interferes with the primary progression mechanics of the game. Black Hole in its current incarnation has neither. It needs to be less of a quirky "I'm not like other powers" power that constantly flakes on you, and instead be something more ugg boots and northface jacket basic. Make it a placed AoE trawl patch with a moderate -tohit debuff (or even -range if you want to add some extra cinnamon to that vanilla chai latte) , and dumpster the entire intangibility fancifulness, and it becomes 1000% better despite being much simpler. Just an example. I know, I know, cottage rule. But this particular cottage needs to be condemned by the city. It's a dump.

Any room or hall too confined or cluttered for me to use a 3/4 overhead camera angle from more than 1 foot away from a character is on my hate list. Because how dare I want to see what the heck is going on in a fight. Also, the "sticky" wall torches in orangebagel can go right back to hell, after stepping on all the legos. The earlier comment about the early map design feeling like old school FPS maps is spot on - the problem is no one but psychopaths play the game in first person for any significant period of time. New maps that aren't warcrimes against the camera would be appreciated. Maybe with a mission generation option toggle so that the masochists that enjoy the old maps can still go there to ERP about how much they enjoy taking a Whirling Mace to the nards too.

Heck, you wouldn't even have to go as far as quirky self token/debuff stacking mechanics - Just make a mutually exclusive crashless toggle that applies a penalty to power costs for all other powers. Any endurance penalty that makes you slow down your attacks is effectively the same thing as a DPS debuff. Or if you really want to, make it give a recharge penalty for all other powers in addition to an endurance penalty (and make them exempt from enhancement). Kind of like how when the devs adjust the base damage of a power they (usually) also alter the base recharge scaling and endurance cost too. It just become the player's way of toggling that adjustment on and off at will. A Scrapper being able to obliterate a single +4 Boss with KO blow won't matter nearly so much if they have to wait until 2-3 spawns later to use it again and it ate a third or half their end bar. Or if by doing so they delayed the recharge of a critical mitigation power. And either way the entire set could use a pass to ensure that it isn't reliant on pool attacks in a way that other sets are not. Just also make sure that the set is rebalanced in such a way that you can still skip 2-3 powers (but are not borderline forced to because they are meme-tier) without shooting your self in the foot. Because having to take every single power in a set for it to function worth a damn also sucks. Usually what this means for many melee sets, is that one of the T1/T2 powers, the Taunt/Confront power, and one misc power are what ends up being skippable.

Not quite what I am talking about. What I am talking about is bypassing incredibly jank process of manually shuffling through the various storage types to do stuff and watching the game visibly chug and reload and the inventory itself skip around and change order and the overall fiddliness of the inventory mechanics. Absolutely nothing directly to do with the tiers of salvage or the specific piece of salvage within a tier. Buying and selling the desired piece from the AH has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Basically the fiddliness of the base storage system strikes me as odd in a game that recognizes there was no gameplay value in forcing players to manually click on dead mobs to loot them.