BasiliskXVIII

The Wild Huntsman, personification of myth. Beasts/Cold MM.

Syzygy, the human waveform. Dark/Sonic Blaster

Kamuro, the fireworks-firing ninja. Pyrotechnics/Martial Assault Dominator

Scree, the Goblin. Mind/Earth Dominator

Poluzhizhn', the living reactor. Radiation Melee/Electric Armor stalker

Sol Ring, My Psionic/Fire Tank. I wanted to give them a kind of Ziggy Stardust vibe and I may have listened to more than a little "Starman" as Ievelled to 50.

I'm not entirely sure, but based on the fact that Pyro control has -KB in Sparkling Chain which also applies their KU "Blast Off" effect, if it does then I think it would just minimize how high they get knocked and not invalidate the knockup entirely. But I'm not entirely clear on the interaction so I may be wrong. My point was mostly just that we already have -kb tools in the game that affect an area, so I could see that same logic popping up elsewhere.

I don't know if it's necessarily completely insane. Most of the AoE immobs already have a high mag -kb effect. I could potentially see adding -kb to tank/brute damage auras (or a theoretical aura/clickie for some specific armour set current or future) or something to keep the group you've already made nice and packed up so they don't need to worry about a stray KB effect flinging half of your herd off to the side and out of your control. You want to knockback, you still have access to every other enemy on the map that isn't currently being handled by the tank.

The I28 P2 patch notes indicating that all non-irresistible −regen should now be resisted by magnitude. However, Malta Titans' Plasma Blast/Quad Plasma Blast applies a −41.67%/sec regeneration debuff regardless of -regen resist or relative level adjustment. This results in the same magnitude applied regardless of con level. It is also currently still showing an effect of -10000% Regen on the power description, which may or may not be correct, given that the patch notes say "Reduced the magnitude of many (not all) low recharge -regen debuffs with magnitudes greater than -100%" but doesn't give any criteria for which remain unchanged. Test results: • Level 50 Psi Tank (@60% Regen resist) vs. red +2 boss (net +4): −41.67%/sec shown. Duration of debuff ~4 sec. • Level 50 Regen Stalker (@68% Regen resist) vs. grey 43 LT (net −6): −41.67%/sec shown. Duration of debuff too short to measure. • Regen debuff resistance did not alter magnitude, only duration. The debuff is not flagged to be irresistible, so magnitude should be reduced by regen debuff resistance and by purple patch level differences. Further Testing by @Maelwys: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/60089-regen-debuff-res-sources/#findComment-747733

I don't think any secondary effect has a greater delta between how good it is when played well, and how awful it is when played badly, which contributes a lot of the hate to it. Especially since the majority of people that I've seen using it in game tend to be in that middling-to-poor range. It's legitimately a good survival tool, but I do wish there were more tools that let you mitigate the scatter. Honestly, a KB IO set that allows you to have guaranteed KB would be a nice counterpoint to Sudden Acceleration, letting you keep your KB, but helping with scatter by ensuring that everything goes. That's where I find it most irritating, in powers like Buckshot, where there's like a 50% chance to KB and it's a narrow cone so you're hitting only a few targets anyway. Also, playing NPC golf with enemies to knock them into AOE effects is a lot of fun. Sonic Thrust is the best power in the game because of that, and it isn't close.

Dominator pets should not have pet controls. This was only added to Controllers.

Regardless, this is still the case for the Malta Titans - not an enemy reserved for a special TF, just an average everyday idiot that you can run into while street sweeping:

According to the patch notes they reduced the number of them, but haven't removed them entirely. Which still seems unfair, given that there's nothing in the game that's going to take your resistances to zero in one shot if you're a fire tank. (Closest thing will be the Crey Radiation PPs which will roughly halve it unresistably) Of course they also haven't given a list of which mobs are supposed to be able to shut you down, so reporting it seems pointless.

The problem is that there's a few powers that reduce regen by magnitude and not by percentage. Malta titans are the worst offenders, given how frequently you'll run into them. As a result, no matter how much -regen resist you have, your regen is turned off.

Crey Radiologists try to irradiate you, Crey Plasma Scientists shoot you with plasma. Crey Cryogenicists try to freeze you. I am very glad that Crey doesn't seem to keep any urologists on staff.

Currently there's one way to resolve the problem: damage. In almost all cases, it's the only way to resolve the problem and it's boringly easy. If you have enough of it, all problems in the game are trivial. The Hamidon is actually a decent example of what I'd like to see more of. There's two main ways I've seen to handle Hami. Have a full league? Then you go around, taking out the various coloured mitos, and then attack the core once his defences are down. Control is on one, ranged damage on another, and melee on another still. If you don't have that, though, you can take the riskier road and just zerg rush the core. Let's face it, if instead of total immunity to mez, the BAF Mindwashed were given something more like Mag -30 to mez with very high resistance, it would probably still be more effective to be focusing on killing them outright. But if you had a few controllers/dominators focusing fire because they're in the fray throwing controls around anyways, they could still accomplish locking them down briefly and buying the group a bit of time. You'd be able to get controllers on the field going "Ok, well, I contributed" rather than "I did less damage than anyone and had no ability to hold them." Right now, support and control in these parts of the game aren’t weak; they’re irrelevant. And that’s not balance, it’s neglect. Letting those roles matter a little more wouldn’t break the game. It’d make more people feel like they were actually playing it.

There’s a concept in D&D called “shoot your monks.” Monks have a cool ability to catch projectiles and, if they succeed on a high enough roll, throw them back. It’s flashy, it’s fun, and it often tempts DMs to avoid ranged attackers so the monk doesn’t dominate the encounter. But the advice goes: shoot your monks anyway. Let them shine. Let them feel awesome, even if just for a moment. Because the player who took the class wants to be able to make use of that ability, and doing so in a way that lets them show off a little, even if it makes a hard fight easy is what makes them feel special But there’s a balance. That monk can’t shut down everything. They have limited resources. One monk catching arrows won’t trivialise an entire encounter full of archers. They’ll contribute. They’ll maybe even dominate a moment. But they won’t make the rest of the party irrelevant. That’s what makes the issue here tricky. If a single Storm character (or a Force Field defender, or anyone with a strong repel aura) can completely block prisoner escapes in the BAF, it doesn’t just let them shine... it erases the mechanic. One person solving a 24-player problem might feel great for the one, but it leaves the rest of the team spectators. That’s not fun, either. That’s not challenge; that’s a bypass. Now, with that said, I do think the “solution” of just flipping switches and disabling entire categories of abilities is lazy, and it does contribute to the idea that only damage really matters. When holds, roots, taunts, or knockback are all quietly invalidated in later content, it undercuts what makes support and control fun in the first place. There’s something broken about a superhero game where you can’t web a villain to a telephone pole and call it a win. But we also have to acknowledge the backend: City of Heroes was, and still is, a complete and utter catastrophe of spaghetti code. The Praetorian arcs were built on a short timeline with limited dev resources, and that shows. They had to ship content that looked like it challenged players, and flipping immunity flags was a quick fix. It’s not elegant design. But it’s also not always malicious. What I’d like to see is more trust in players’ creativity: more content that lets the Stormie block the door, if they work with the team. Or lets the Controller hold a key target if they time it well. Or lets the Tank’s taunt make a difference. Because when those things land, it’s unforgettable. And when they’re shut out by default, we all feel a little less relevant.

It's the superhero that AI art was made for!

I mean, I don't know your character. Maybe you were drawn by Rob Liefield.

In practice, the economy of CoH makes absolutely no sense. You ever taken a look at your SOs? "Yeah, I want to trade off my ninja training and those last three times I got exposed to Xenon and Boron. In return, I'd also like you to mutate me a bit more. Oh, and here's three bits of regenerating flesh to go with it, I don't need that anymore. I used one of those earlier to become blessed by wind to move faster." Better to think of it all as a really weird abstraction and assume it makes more sense in universe than in the real world.

The symbol is definitely the "defence increased" symbol, but why it's there I can't say. It does show up on some of my characters too, and all I can guess it that there's a display error with the emanator.

I kind of feel like Crey and Nemesis Snipers belong here, not out of a "oh, this is so hard," perspective, but simply "what are they accomplishing?" They make sense from the early game concept, where you were expected to do a lot of street sweeping, but in the modern game, they're just kind of a sad relic of old game design, only there to punish you if you're in a team in FF or PI and your team leader disconnects. It upsets me because I feel like there should be something that they could do to make them legitimately interesting, but as it stands their primary purpose is to make the word "Miss!" appear over my head periodically while I'm running through FF, CF and PI. But since anything that forces you to stop when you're going from mission to mission is mostly just going to be an annoyance, I can't think of what might function as an improvement.

Isn't this basically a short description of ALL of Nemesis' tech?

I feel like the changes to the Crey Paragon Protectors, where they lock out their ult when controlled, was a good first step for this, and a model for how the game could make a niche for controls to be useful. I don't know if it would make much of a change to steamrolling teams, but certainly some annoying enemies with abilities that can't practically be stopped otherwise, such as rez effects, or Illusionists' phase shift could be a contender for that same "if controlled, this ability is locked out" effect to give Controllers and Doms a substantive role.

I totally forgot about Vorpal Judgement. Maybe just "I wonder if we could make a Melee cone without a target and still have it work?" I dunno. Even if it's not literally a test of a concept, it feels like it is one. I kind of wish they would change it to a targeted cone because I agree- I've had far more misfires and wasted uses of the power than I've been able to find use cases where the untargeted version justifies itself, which is why I was curious if there was a reason for it.