BasiliskXVIII

So, I ended up going with a Beam Rifle/Poison Corruptor and I'm finally up to 30 with her, mostly soloing, but running some TFs in between too. I figured I'd bring my impressions here in case the title catches someone's eye and they're curious. I've skipped a lot of the "help other people powers" as is my wont as a Corruptor. I've only got a very few IOs slotted, so this is basically my impressions on SOs: The game is entirely different before and after Venomous Gas. I was squishy AF before, and now I can barrel into crowds with near impunity, even unslotted. Almost everything is click-based, so it can get pretty dang end-hungry. Slotting for end reduction is nearly a must. Having good targeting binds is a must, because you'll want at least a targetnear bind and a targetnext bind on tap to maximise the use of Weaken and Envenom. Poison Trap is not nearly the same as the version from Traps. It seems to get a lot of stick because of that. However, the Lockdown Proc gives it a decent bit of usefulness in controlling minions, and its deployment time is much faster. It needs to be slotted for Accuracy to make the most out of procs though. Beam Rifle is not an ideal choice for primary. I built the character before seeing Uun's advice on that one. However, it is also very single-target focused and its cones can be leveraged by hopping out of melee and back in so it's at least manageable. Neurotoxic Breath is a lifesaver at lower levels both to help group enemies up and to help get away when you're getting overwhelmed (Which will happen often enough). Its usefulness drops off a lot as enemies get more powerful ranged attacks, though. Weaken's -Special blows my mind. Even with the Corruptor's weaker modifiers, judicious use against enemies with annoying status effects turns 5-10 second holds to 1-2 second holds, Which is good because you're SUPER vulnerable to Mez. It's pretty hard to justify using your secondary for most mobs in team content since they just melt so fast and the AoE is so tiny. Even Alkaloid is so slow to deploy that it's hard to use where you'd want. It's a weird, very glass-cannonny build, but I am having fun with it because it is quite different. I really would like to see the AoEs of the main debuffs to get improved radiuses, similar to what Acid Arrow got in /TA. I'd even be willing to give up the stacking of the ST and AOE components if that were the necessary cost. Weaken especially, if it had a decent chance to hit whole spawns instead of one guy, maybe two if you're lucky, would improve the survivability a lot.

I haven't played in a long while. I'm getting back into the game, tinkering with some alts, and was thinking about running a /Poison Corr. I know back on live it was generally considered a pretty poor secondary. But then, so was Trick Arrow, and I know that's gotten a fair amount of love since moving over. Has it gotten any love? Or were the haters on live just wrong?

I'm inclined to say that making the practically unusable sets into something usable, even if it's just in those circumstances where you hit your cap on 3.75% Ranged Def sets, and you would be looking at the trivial 0.625% Ranged Def on Pulverising Fisticuffs just to eke out a tiny bit more, if it didn't cap out at level 25, would be a good first step in this. It would at least help sort out "what's not used because it's garbage" from "what's not used because it's impractical?" Honestly, the more I think of it, the more I wonder if IOs even need levels. I don't know what the general consensus is on this, but for my part, I'm not seriously looking at set IOs (with the exception of procs) until I can slot level fifties anyway. Having an IO for every level in a given level range might have been fine on live, but there's a lot less supply and demand happening on Homecoming. So why not just get rid of all of the leveled IOs, and have one recipe for each set that's attuned as soon as you craft it? If the worry is about catalysts losing their place, then maybe the IOs can level up with you but don't scale down unless they're catalysed. Being able to use my drops as I get them because the recipe I get at level 30 is just as good as the one I'll get would be a lot more fun than selling them off, and would make buying expensive salvage pieces a lot more appealing. .

I feel like this would be just more annoying than fun. Imagine starting a Synapse TF and then suddenly Skyway shuts down travel powers. Unless turning them back on again was something really, really trivial, (in which case, why bother with the event?) this feels like it'd just be a good way to piss everyone in the zone off and convince them to leave until it's done. You can't mandate that people have fun doing the things that you like, and trying to force them to is a good way to make them actively dislike it. It's annoying enough when you're flying from mission to mission and get pot-shotted out of the air on a lowbie when a Rikti Invasion happens. It also messes with lore factors too. After all, maybe some kind of remote interference might turn off a jetpack, but how do you turn off someone's wings? If you want people to go out of their way to slow down and explore, then a far better way would be to reward that behaviour. Maybe a series of badges like "x number of miles travelled without using a travel power." I don't know if that's something that can be tracked, but rewarding slow travel is definitely something I'd rather see over force-disabling fast travel.

What if attuning IO sets simply allowed them to function to your level regardless of their level range? It wouldn't be cheap to keep them relevant if you wanted the set bonus, but if there are balancing concerns about having more desirable set bonuses available at lower slotting requirements, then at least the additional cost required to make them function well at higher tiers of play would help counteract that. For me, the big thing that is appealing about this idea is that it would open a lot more options for the less commonly-used IO sets, such as the various debuff sets. Maybe the "Discouraging Words" set isn't something that every ToHit power is clamouring to use, but at least having it as an option would give it a lot more relevance than its current status as an IO set that spans levels 10-20. Even soloing, I can get through that in an afternoon. Just having one more set relevant at 50 would increase the number of ToHit Debuff sets by 50% (33% if you count the accurate debuff sets too) Making all of the lv10-20 sets would double the current options.

Even if not all hairstyles were included it'd be nice to have a few different options for the Santa hat with the existing no hair, but also medium and long hair options, Even if that meant the colour choices in the "with hair" versions being for the hat on primary colour and hair on secondary, and having no way to customise the ruff and pom pom, at least it'd better than long-haired characters going bald with the Santa hat. It wouldn't be too far different than goggles and glasses having options to be worn on the forehead or over the eyes. It's far from ideal, but it's a kludgy way to make a better alternative than we currently have. Another possible way that it could be implemented, though this is probably a lot more work, would be to copy the Santa hat object to the "Detail 1" list for standard heads with a number of the other head pieces like the ringed sci-fi antennae. It'd need to be resized and repositioned, and it would exclude it from being used with glasses, and there'd be a lot of places you'd run into clipping, but at least in theory it should be workable. But it would also set the precedent, and would kinda obsolete the "hats" head category once it was done for one and people started asking for every hat as a detail. After all, if I can wear a santa hat with long hair, why not a fedorah? As Greycat said, this is City of Kludges and Hacks. A simple curved cone with some shaggy fur and a pom pom on it was probably just whipped together quickly and added to the Christmas event, which is why adding hair to it probably wasn't a priority. It sticks out far from the body, so it can't clip with most costumes, and limiting the hairstyles it could be used with to "none" meant that the hair clipping also wasn't an option.

And just hope that anyone to pass away between now and then aren't particularly well liked, I guess.

And to complicate things further, would someone who was madly passionate about the game but preferred to enjoy it with a dedicated group of friends or solo and didn't engage with the wider community much be less worthy of a monument in the game than one who posts a lot but doesn't play very much?

Sure, there's room to improve his characterisation going forward, but they could also just as easily introduce a new character who is interesting on their own merits. As it stands, it just kinda feels like bringing him back is like going to some random statue, and bringing the person depicted back to life without any real justification for it other than the statue is kinda cool. I think, if it came down to a question of "we need to reform Statesman's character" then we would be a lot better served by an arc where we're given a chances to see who Statesman was and why he was so beloved. Whether it's a time travel arc, or something like Portal Corp going "Oh, here's another parallel Earth, this one is exactly identical to ours, but time runs slightly slower so it's the 1950s here", it'd make a lot more sense to me to build up the payoff to Who Will Die than to stroke it out and pretend it didn't happen.

I feel like a big pain point with the zone events is that they don't scale especially well. If I'm just messing around, going from one mission to the next, and happen across the Steel Canyon fire, it's not generally something that I can rush into and run by myself, particularly as a character that's level appropriate to the zone. The fires are particularly bad for that, too, given their reasonably short timer. And for the most part, you have to want to do them for the sake of doing them, because their rewards aren't especially good if you don't badge hunt. If a single hero working from the beginning of the event to the end could reasonably expect to be able to complete it, and would get at least as much reward for it as they would running story missions for the same amount of time, then they might be willing to simply jump in on a whim. And once one person is there, then others may be more willing to help. Having to whip up a group just to hopefully be able to do the event is not a huge amount of effort, but it's also more than none, particularly if you have no idea if anyone's going to bite in time.

The challenge for me is that even as someone who read the novels, and followed the comics, it's really hard to give a crap about Statesman. He was a golden-age inspired flying brick whose main point of interest when compared to similar characters like Superman or Captain Marvel/Shazam is that he seemed to occasionally be kind of a dick. The "Who Will Die" arc was a dumb stunt to drive interest, but Statesman never really had enough character development for me to "miss" having him around beyond perhaps a vague interest in the idea that maybe something interesting could happen to him. Sister Psyche was slightly better developed, since she did have at least a more prominent role in the comics, but not by a lot. Please, please spare me the "Tyrant takes over as Statesman" arc, though. There's enough psychotic fascists taking centre stage in real life, I really don't need them in my escapism.

I have to admit that wet giving a bonus to cold was not at all my first instinctive guess. If anything I would have thought that it would react with electricity, similar to Baldur's Gate 3 where splashing someone with water makes you deal more lightning damage to them. However, since I was playing a storm/storm, it became pretty clear that my various lightning powers didn't seem to do anything special to a wet enemy. Dealing less fire damage was my next thought, but even without testing that, the idea that a water or storm blast character could just screw over a team by making things harder for fire characters to deal damage seemed unlikely.

Ah, so at this point it doesn't so anything other than make the green text show up in the combat log?

I've just recently come back and have been playing around with some new characters. I noticed this on several of my Storm Blast Corruptor's powers that the tooltips say +Wet, and there's an occasional message in the combat log saying that "<Enemy> is now Wet". My Water Blast characters have the same. Looking through the detailed power description, though, doesn't really give any details about the wet condition or what it represents. Is this just the "dripping water" effect that shows up on the affected character, or does "wet" do something else, possibly in conjunction with one of the other new power sets?

No, pivoting tactics is just because certain people like to show up and turn suggestion threads from "I do/don't like this suggestion because..." into, "the problem you are having is invalid because...". And frankly I don't really care how valid you think my issue is. The solutions you present are present, true, but they are a long walk on a hot day, and could be made simpler while also introducing something that I think would be a useful and fun expansion of the crafted power system while keeping in scope. Thus far, the only argument that I've seen you make against the actual suggestion itself is that you don't like suggestions that encroach temp powers onto existing pool and power sets. Ok, fine. That's personal preference, and it's valid, but it's not exactly constructive feedback to the suggestion as posted. This is probably a question we actually can answer. Given that Teleport Target used to be Teleport Friend and Teleport Foe before being (rightly) merged into one, there probably is data somewhere of how many players had taken Teleport Foe. My anecdotal evidence is that back when I was playing on live, If you had Teleport and picked up TP Foe over TP Friend, you were either using a build for PVP (which eventually fell out of favour when TP Foe gained its immunity phase against players) or you were a weirdo. However, Flurry has also traditionally been a maligned pool pick, and even it wasn't so unpopular as to need to be paired with a different power to make it worthwhile. Yes, it does mean you'll be able to TP bosses away. But you can plink bosses with the envenomed dagger and pull them too, that's hardly broken. As someone who did take TP foe on my stalker thinking it would be a great tool for mitigating aggro, it wasn't nearly as good as I'd hoped, and if this is intended to be the main use case of it, the sucker who tries is probably going to lament the lack of accuracy slotting. And if it is a regular part of your strategy, then you're probably going to want to pick up the power anyways just to have the version that lets you teleport allies and slot it. You say it doesn't happen. I had it happen yesterday to me, twice. Exiting and re-entering did not resolve the issue, neither did waiting for 15-20 minutes, running around and taunting the guy in the wall and trying to bait him out, or to find that one magical spot that would let me shoot him. Both the brown and the purple caves have a lot of really janky geometry, and yes, I probably will have to pick up TP Target on my stormy because, honestly, I don't think it's possible to close all the cracks that mobs fall into there, though I'm still holding out hope that when I finally get Tornado it will give me enough versatility I was thinking 5 charges, a rare recipe. Limited enough that having the power ready for every spawn would be impractical, and missing with it would hurt but wouldn't also totally waste it.

So, what if we just assumed the premise of my suggestion is "TP Foe would be a good addition to the craftable powers list" and ignored the specific circumstances which caused this particular incident? Even if I'm the only person in the world for whom stuck mobs occasionally don't free themselves, expanding the craftable powers to include useful abilities that are situational seems like the ideal use case for them, and there's plenty of reasons why you might want to occasionally have access to the TP Foe ability. The fact that it can also be used to unstick an enemy is a nice extra on that. I'd open it up to just being a temp power version of Teleport Target, but to me that feels like it would overshadow the pool power.

It works, but GMs are limited, and I'd just as soon not have to bother them if I don't need to. Having a temp power to be able to fix it yourself if you have troubles getting ahold of a GM or are just impatient just feels to me like it's the perfect excuse. And, frankly, TP Foe is exactly the kind of weird situational power that having a dozen charges of it handy, even just for gameplay, is just about right

After getting an enemy stuck in geometry shortly after having been forced to complete another mission for the same reason it would be nice to have some method to deal with the occasional idiot getting stuck in walls blocking a "defeat all" mission in a way that doesn't require a full power pick. Since Teleport foe and friend have been merged into simply "Teleport Target", having just the "foe" side of the power craftable feels sufficiently weak enough to not render its pool power equivalent obsolete.