CoeruleumBlue

Maybe Tyrant's consciousness and two Well powers got eaten by Praetorian Hamidon, which will give it the motivation to become Ascended, and then it can go to the Shadow Shard and eat it? It can also eat Battalion but I hope they make Battalion more interesting than the original design for Battalion. I also don't necessarily mind the idea that Battalion might feature assimilated or reflected or cloned enemies and/or friends in some way or prominently, it just needs to be more interesting than "Battalion is going to eat your soul-essence and turn you into a pale red version of yourself with spikes before fighting against Rularuu to consume the infinite dimensions! Which will win, purple cosmic laser blasts, or red cosmic laser blasts? Stay tuned!" I'm glad they're not obligated to continue the original story, and I know they aren't or I wouldn't have come up with the idea of Praetorian Hamidon Ascending and just eating all the Ascended monsters I think are stupid, but I still want to throw ideas out there. And I also have no problem with the idea of characters getting ultimate power and just totally merging with some archetypal power, I just don't want to see it turn into the whole Marvel and DC cosmic laser blast fight thing, which the whole Rularuu thing is very much turning into. Rularuu also just looks like the Kings of Edom from the Champions Online game that the same people made but the Kings of Edom are more interesting. The floating purple guys are just their Avatars though, the Kings of Edom are not actually floating purple guys, and they actually kind of do something like what I think they want Battalion to do, in that there are basically dark versions of everyone and everything. The problem is they kind of sort of already did that with Praetoria, then they toned down Praetoria, then they made all the Primal Earth people look like scumbags with all the Vigilante morality missions so it kind of looks like Praetorians are nicer than Primal Earth people to me despite their morally questionable decisions at times. There's no "dark mirror" aspect to Battalion at all, it basically just seems like a generic Borg/Flood/etc. "you will be assimilated" thing. That was nice when Star Trek did it because they were opposing the Hegelian strand in science fiction that wants to see everything become a hivemind, but like, we already fought against that with Rikti and Rikti were more interesting, Rikti even look a lot like the Borg and the Thing and take way more serious inspiration from real science fiction. I think probably one of the issues with the whole Rularuu and Battalion thing is it is trying to copy Qliphoth from Champions TTRPG and Champions Online, but like, that's actually a thing from Kabbalah, it's actually real occultism, ditto for Kings of Edom even if the game version isn't the actual Kings of Edom and there aren't even the same number of them. The Champions also end up looking like total scumbags because the Qliphoth realm is actually secretly exactly the same as the regular world, it's just like the shadow side, not a mirror universe like the Star Trek mirror universe or Superman Bizarro World. Also, those facts combined with the fact Champions games and comics also have an enemy group called Purple Gang used to make me wonder if the author was Jewish. Purple Gang isn't just a random color name for a gang like someone who didn't like Champions lore on the Internet once wrote, that's actually the real-life Jewish mafia, and I've seen that reference in other contexts as well. Even if Reddit feels kind of meh to me, I almost had to do a double-take on the comment that was like "I actually don't really like Marvel or DC, I feel like CoH does a better job of envisioning a world where super-stuff is as common as it is," when I saw that and that wasn't a username I ever posted with. A lot of the reason people play this game in general instead of that Marvel game is probably that people don't like Marvel's woldbuilding overall, in addition to people wanting to make their own characters instead of just being the Marvel characters. This game also just happens to be much more popular than the DC MMO game but that one is old now and also actually an MMO. I think CoX does a really good job being really grounded even if there are plenty of plot holes, things I would've done differently, etc. and then the whole finale with Battalion and Rularuu was going totally off the rails and turning it back into Marvel Cosmic Lasers. I also do think Arachnos should be more prominent instead of Nemesis. I think Mender Silos should be fought since Nemesis literally killed an alternate world of dark-skinned people and funded Nazis and other stupid stuff, but like, Lord Recluse is supposed to have the mind of a god to match Statesman having the body of a god, Arachnos being a few people who mostly just cause minor mischief on some Caribbean islands and don't do much anything to move the plot forward (or backward since they're suppoesd to be villains) doesn't really stand up to that. Arachnos tech looks like it's almost the same level as Praetorian, they also literally have Seers, etc. and I tend to wonder if that comes from Tartarus, but apparently Tartarus can't actually do anything except rob some Level 50 banks in-between the Nazi splinter group doing it. Nemesis on the other hand is just an old German guy who used science to live a long time kind of like Crey or something. He has some interesting things but I get kind of bored with the idea that everything is or isn't a Nemesis plot. Like do people just like him because they want to have a German villain? But he doesn't make any sense as an archvillain and his robots and staves look so silly and are easily-beaten. (The fact they look stylistically the same as Ouroboros and the Menders is a nice touch though at least.) Crey also happens to kind of be more interesting in terms of European mad science villains anyway, since I see a lot of origin stories and characters involving Crey and not many involving Nemesis. Honestly Nemesis almost feels like a joke character to me with how much he's played up and how comical some of his stuff looks, but Nemesis can be kind of silly without being a joke if he isn't treated like the great archvillain and then not actually used for much anything.

That's only Rectified Recticle though, I was talking about max perception, not merely increased perception, and also, you can literally slot Rectified Reticle in Tactics anyway so literally anyone can slot it, but slotting Rectified Reticle in Tactics doesn't get you to max perception. It literally doesn't matter how many +ToHit slots are in powers because Rectified Reticle is a unique enhancement and you can't slot more than one no matter how many +ToHit slots you have, you absolutely have to have +Perception somewhere to get max unless you get lucky with Secondary Mutation or Mystic Fortune or you're using the Incandescence Total Radial Invocation. Granted, those at least exist, but in many places incarnates are disabled or just go on cooldown and Secondary Mutation and Mystic Fortune are random. Inspirations can sometimes be turned off too so making those at invention tables will have the same issues and that's also pretty silly to do when there at least kind of are powers you can use, they're just not part of your actual build so they're not so reliable, and it would be better if Epic Pools had more of them since it's still way easier to get a bunch of stealth than a bunch of perception despite perception having a higher cap on every single archetype and being more in-demand. The ice cage thing is probably something from another server like Rebirth I accidentally found and didn't notice where it was from, even though I haven't seen it again.

To be honest, I'm kind of glad the finale to this game was cancelled, because having Rularuu eat the Battalion sounds kind of like a dumb ending, and having all the player characters ascend to the level of an infinite-dimensional god also seems like a dumb story. Honestly I just think Rularuu is kind of silly in general. It's Shuma-Gorath but it looks like a floating purple dude, and Shuma-Gorath is already silly but at least Shuma-Gorath looks like an actual eldritch abomination instead of a floating purple dude. Like everything in the game lore is super grounded in reality until you get to a floating purple dude who can snap and create and destroy an infinite number of universes. Like no, Marvel's worldbuilding is really silly, let's not import that here, but make it even sillier by turning it into a floating purple dude instead of a tentacle monster. I heard that Praetorian Hamidon was almost going to become an Ascended if it merged with Emperor Cole and I think we should go with that. I read on the Wiki the only reason Emperor Cole even became Emperor Cole was partially because he had the favor of Praetorian Hamidon due to swearing to protect nature, and Emperor Cole already has two Well of the Furies powers, so let's just merge them and they can eat Rularuu and Battalion. Emperor Cole saves the day from Nemesis yet again, praise Emperor Cole, who is secretly the same as Hamidon because of the Well archetypes hijacking everyone's minds who has them or whatever. Honestly Battalion doesn't seem too interesting either. Like literally it's just the Flood from Halo? How is that more interesting than the Rikti time travelling to another dimension, trying to evolve humans into aliens and devolving tons of them into monkeys, trying to kill the gods but becoming the new gods on the Rikti Earth, and then getting destroyed because magic doesn't come from the gods after all, and maybe all of them were secretly just genetically engineered humans who were a Hegelian hivemind all along? The biggest baddest threats need to be something other than some kind of corrupting pathogen that just assimilates random enemies and makes them into a corrupted version and a floating purple guy who lives on a floating rock island and destroys a gazillion universes by pointing his finger at them, so I would be happy if they all got eaten by Hamidon rather than everyone turning into purple infinite-dimensional gods that all shoot purple infinite-dimensional lasers out of their god-fingers at other people. Like the entire rest of the story has been stuff that's actually pretty grounded and nuanced like Mot being a feedback loop that destroys reality or Hamidon being genetic engineering to get rid of humanity or the Lost being like the children from Childhood's End who get assimilated into the Overmind, can we please not have it devolve into god-lasers at the end? That being said I don't want Hamidon to eat all of existence, just the god-lasers because that's so silly. Then maybe people can fight Mender Silos for secretly being Nemesis or something because Nemesis is actually interesting. Battalion could be interesting since it hasn't actually been fleshed out but the pictures I saw made them look super mundane, like you fight through all this actually serious stuff from Arthur C. Clarke and Olaf Stapledon and what have you just to get to the Big Bad and have them be the generic invading aliens Loki gets the Tesseract to beat from the original The Avengers movie. Let's please not. I am glad the story to this game got cancelled if people were just writing silly stuff just to write silly stuff, now that it's un-cancelled could we maybe write something better? So, will Hamidon eat Rularuu?

I've seen more than one final arc though and I'm not sure we're not just getting a biased viewpoint. Is there anything wrong with just being in things for power? And why not just protect people? I'm not sure being "free from Cole" is important at all. Just because everyone grows up watching Star Wars doesn't mean it makes sense to rebel against an authoritarian regime no matter what. The alternative seems to be a world where there are a bunch of people with superpowers running around, yet everything technologically, scientifically, socially, and culturally stays in an exaggerated state of stasis because no one wants to change anything. A few scary things here and there is vastly superior to that. Plus, have you even see Vigilante morality missions? If anything Primal Earth's so-called heroes are way more immoral than the Praetoria Praetors. The Praetoria Praetors are doing experiments on people without their consent to try to turn them into gods and make them live forever, the Primal Earth heroes are doing experiments on people without their consent to try to turn off their powers because powers bother them. One of these things seems vaguely justified in a utilitarian way because there's no rule saying the best option objectively can't be one that makes everyone squeamish, the other just seems like someone is scared of change. That's Noble Savage who I mentioned from one of the end arcs, he's literally a Resistance member and you meet him through his Resistance member friends. Even if he wasn't a Resistance member when they experimented on him, all his friends were terrorists, so yeah, of course they would single him out to remove him preemptively. The Seers know what people will do after all. They have a department of pre-crime and... the department of pre-crime happened to be correct. He wasn't a criminal when they took him to experiment on him, but he became one, and you probably, pathetically, don't even need psychic powers to do that because all his friends and associates were in the Resistance anyway. Isn't it nice that the Praetorians know who's going to become a terrorist in the future so they can isolate them in the tunnels away from the other terrorists preemptively? Thank Emperor Cole and Mother Mayhem. Primal Earth is nowhere near catching up there, their terrorists are just allowed to run around because of some inane unfounded belief in "free will."

Regarding Ghouls, all the known people who were experimented on and turned into Ghouls were themselves Resistance members, and the Resistance members plant bombs in office buildings, and also are the ones who think Ghouls are mindless zombies rather than just regular people who look sick or ugly or like they have been totally roided out, and the ones they see just happen to be hungry all the time because their metabolisms are super high... but they never ever eat each other despite that. They would probably just eat rats or something if the Resistance didn't treat them like trash, so yeah, the Resistance is at least as responsible for Ghouls as Neuron is. It's definitely icky that the government is experimenting on people without their consent, but like, it seems like they're literally just experimenting on the people who planted bombs in an office building or aided and abetted the people who planted bombs in an office building, and once they finish the experiment they would probably hypothetically be able to cure them all anyway. I'm having a hard time seeing this as better than Ms. Liberty making a paramilitary group armed with flamethrowers and semi-automatic weapons to do things like kidnap the mutant son of a famous scientist and deliver him back to his father who will attempt to remove his mutation, or send the paramilitary group armed with flamethrowers and semi-automatic weapons to do many other things that hassle civilians in the name of the law on the Vigilante-aligned morality missions, or basically being rather a lot like what many people criticize with comic book superheroes and just not changing anything like Superman or "being a rich 1%er beating up the mentally ill" like Batman, the latter of which also brings up the fact the so-called heroes don't do anything mundane to make the city better either in addition to also adding questionable things. For example, in Star Trek the crew of the Enterprise is just taken aback when they see a Dyson sphere, yet the Rikti are basically the aliens or genetically-engineered humans who would build a Dyson sphere to begin with, which is actually an idea taken from Olaf Stapledon, the Rikti are basically a combination of the genetically-engineered human-aliens from First and Last Men/Last Men in London/The Star Maker series combined with Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke which was inspired by Olaf Stapledon anyway. You're telling me the technology level in CoX is basically centuries, millennia, and maybe millions or billions of years in the future of what exists in Star Trek once you add in the fact there are ancient Lovecraftian elder gods whose technology is literally the Magic origin, yet the best Paragon City can do is a bunch of underwhelming and usually run-down and crime-ridden 1990s architecture that's less impressive in scale, aesthetics, and technology than what I see when I take walks? I get that there would be poor parts, but like, I don't get the "Superman can't fix society because then people would be shamed by an alien fixing things for them" kind of argument. I think Superman fixing society is way more interesting even if it leads to some more morally grey questions here and there. Literally the only thing that seems like a real problem rather than just being kind of authoritarian that anyone can point to in Praetoria is the Ghouls, and even if we assume the Ghouls are definitely a huge problem and not something more questionable and the ends can never justify the means, and also that they're definitely not just experimenting on known terrorists or accessories to terrorism who would otherwise get a death penalty or something worse, I don't think that one thing outweighs all the horrible stuff that goes on in Vigilante alignment missions, or just allowing most of the city to be totally dilapidated and gangs to run amok when it could be genuinely really futuristic and interesting. So yeah, if that's the worse thing it's a net positive and you just sort of end up with another science fiction story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but it's more complicated than that because the Omelas kid is clearly pure and innocent, while it seems like the Ghouls are just people who are being subject to those experiments as a punishment for literally terrorism against civilians even if they're civilians who like Cole too much, it might be curable at some point in the future anyway even if that's a very ends-justify-the-means argument, and they're being as nice to the Ghouls as they possibly can rather than acting explicitly sadistic. So even with the Ghouls I just don't know how to argue Paragon City is better. The world where superheroes solve people's problems just seems better than the one where they claim to be hands-off but they really just keep the status quo around in terms of technology, societal change, and literally everything else. If people would improve society themselves you could say that supers doing it are bad guys, but it's hard to say that when they don't improve it themselves, and also when literally anyone with any talent at all even if it's learned like Natural and a lot of Magic, Technology, and Science heroes can be anyway, or that people with gifts aren't secretly a bunch of Mutants, then you're basically just saying people with talent changing society is bad because occasionally there are bad results and definitely a lot of questioanble results, and that freaks people out even if there seems to be a net positive overall. ...So yeah, I'm actually having trouble figuring out what's so bad about Praetoria, because even though clearly there are some problems in Praetoria and it isn't perfect, it's hard to see any of those as being worse than the problems in Paragon City that the supers either cause directly or could fix but choose not to, the Ghouls included in that, the only perceived problems with it seem to amount to "authority bad," "change bad," and "supers should pretend not to exist for the sake of the general population (even though literally anyone with enough talent or money is a super by default so that's literally anyone who could do anything.)" I guess Paragon City takes the whole "Superheroes are defenders of the status quo" thing very for granted even though in my experience that's not actually the case with all superheroes media and the only examples people ever point to with that are basically just Avengers and Justice League and their individual members. But I don't think it's ever been true of say X-Men especially, or Spider Man, or Fantastic Four with Richard Reeds doing all his experiments all the time, or non-Marvel and non-DC superheroes like the Incredibles, or for one individual Justice League superhero, I don't think it's true of Wonder Woman who actually does try to change society unlike Superman, Batman, the Flash, and most of the rest of them. There are more stories out there where superheroes try to change society or just don't try not to change society than not, just a couple of the top superhero stories that are considered the all-American ones and whatever are status quo ones, even though those aren't even necessarily the most popular ones in addition to only being a minority of stories. I think a lot of the sort of metanarrative problems with this game in general come from the fact that it seems like it's all from Champions TTRPG lore, but the names are swapped, and then they try to actually make Defender/Statesman the unironic good guy. The bad part though is that instead of the evil Qliphothic magic world that's made by the subversion of Qabalah, you just have some vaguely socialist authoritarian world where superheroes are in charge and make some morally questionable decisions sometimes beyond just being kind of authoritarian (there's a reason I don't count stuff like Seers as huge problems, that's just part of it being authoritarian, while the Ghouls are not.) Like instead of Earth and a seriously dark magic parallel Earth that's run by demon summoning and human sacrifice and actually seriously horrendous stuff, it's literally just Earth and a more authoritarian Earth where you have some problems from people having unchecked authority and that's about it, they don't seem to be trying to be explicitly sadistic or anything even if there are sketchy decisions being made. Is that what we're supposed to be fighting against, the idea that even if everyone benefits from the supers running the government that's bad because the police will read people's minds and there will be unauthorized experiments and questionable socialist realist art and too many things named after Cole? Yeah, I went in seeing all the tropes and being like "it's the sinisterly pretty evil world, aaaah!" and came out just being like, the people in my middle school class who wanted a dictatorship as long as no one was being sent to concentration camps or discriminated against were probably right and now I feel weird.

When I read it it sounds bad, sure, but when you play missions there you always want to end up going Loyalist, because the Resistance just wants to blow everything up and do literal terrorism, and I'm not sure they even have a government to replace all the Cole stuff with, just anarchism and terrorism. You could always just say the Loyalists are bad and Resistance is worse and that's why we're glad we live on Primal, but like, the Freedom Phalanx and Longbow seem pretty terrible. Praetoria is pretty authoritarian and it has issues, but I'm having trouble thinking that Praetoria's issues are worse than Primal Earth's issues, especially the ones the so-called heroes caused firsthand. Like Praetoria isn't perfect but just because it's authoritarian and a bunch of people have a weird personality cult, but it doesn't seem to quite be an actual cult, around Cole actually doesn't make it seem that dystopian. Like, are people just scared because it's different, it's authoritarian, and it looks pretty and those three things are enough to make everyone think it's automatically going to be North Korea? If anything it seems more like Singapore but without all the human trafficking and I'm having trouble figuring out what's so bad about that. A lot of the wall art is questionable but it's at least more interesting than the questionable wall art on most buildings on Primal Earth, and if people name things after Cole who cares, even if Cole named things after himself that's not great but not the biggest problem anyone has ever had. I'm not sure being "more libertarian" is a good tradeoff at all for all the problems on Primal Earth, especially since Primal Earth seems like it can be just as personality cult-y, just with more people instead of only Cole all the time, and none of them seem to even slightly deserve any of it because Primal Earth mostly just looks like a big slum with outdated technology and people with actual powers instead of just really good with a bow or having a suit or whatever being rejected from society and so many more problems than Praetorian Earth does. Like on Primal Earth there are a gazillion random gangs running around, on Praetorian it's basically just political fighting, the Syndicate doing organized crime, Ghouls eating people, Clockwork malfunctioning, Hamidon in First Ward and shadow stuff in Night Ward. The threats in Praetoria might be bigger but you're also less likely to ever encounter them and if you do you're just a Powers Division person who can handle it anyway, regular people on the street don't have to know or care what's going on and they'll probably have a better quality of life. If you're a regular person you probably have a better quality of life, if you're Powers Division you'll probably have a better quality of life because there's a lot of backstabbing and stuff but you can handle it, if you get abducted for an experiment like Noble Savage at worst you just get turned into a way cooler monster than what you would've on Primal Earth and if you have a problem with being a monster, well, that kind of is the Resistance's fault because who wouldn't rather be a cool monster with your mind intact than a regular human anyway? That's just your internalized Othering of people getting at yourself. So yeah, I don't actually see what the big problem with Praetoria is except basically people are just afraid of things that are different and Cole has an ego and most people go along with each others' egos. There are definitely real problems in Praetoria and there's no use pretending there aren't, I just don't see how the ones in Primal Earth aren't worse. The fact Praetoria is supposed to be an evil dictatorship and... I'm not sure how it is to be honest is still moderately concerning to me. Like I'm just playing the stories and it seems like living in Praetorian Earth would be way better than Primal Earth, the stuff you have to do is more worthwhile and everything works better, I'm not sure it being a dictatorship makes it evil as much as that just drags back memories of classes in like middle school I was in where everyone made a fictional country and one group said they wanted a dictatorship and they didn't think that had to be evil and the teacher was like "wtf." Now I feel like it's my turn to become one of those edgelords. If people who accomplished more get more of an ego and backstab each other somewhat who cares, if the alternative is that the world is worse for everyone because the competent people aren't allowed to do anything.

VEATs literally can pick from 40 powers plus the Patron Pools and Ancillary Pools. You literally can't pick everything they can do if you wanted to. Saying that if you pick Hide and Stealth and layer it on them like a Stalker would, you should have your stealth capped at 571 anyway because you had the option to pick something else instead of double-dipping Stealth makes no sense. Ditto for the 1000 feet of stealth on Illusion and Arsenal Control, and extra stealth on anyone who takes Stealth, an IO, and one of the various other stealths that can sometimes stack with Hide. Anything you pick is something else you didn't pick. Yes, and the fact that lots of ATs don't get +Perception and it's fairly randomly included in Epic/Patron pools when it's included at all is the entire reason for this thread. You can get it from Mace Mastery on Controllers and a few other assorted things, Dominators can't get it at all because it's replaced with a stasis field power no one ever actually takes and no Dominator Primary or Secondary comes with +Perception despite the fact you can do Psi/Psi/Psi, Dark/Dark/Dark, and Arsenal/Arsenal/Mace, as well as Savage Assault which is basically the kind of set that'd have +Perception if it were on an actual melee archetype, etc. Blasters mostly have the same problem. It's kind of weird that a lot of the Radiation sets that have a -Defense because you're making them glow don't also have -Stealth with that even though there is -Stealth sometimes on some powers here and there, etc. Overall I just think perception and stealth are neglected in this game because in a lot of PvP and some PvE content here and there you probably will get your immersion completely broken if you try to play certain things and then run into the fact stealth and perception are neglected due to the fact there's not all that much PvE content (though there's some) that uses it and not many people PvP that often. Yes, but in those couple of scenarios you'll still just be broken out of the feel of being this superhero/villain/ambiguous person and be like "oh no, I can't see them with my ESP/ghost senses/animal senses/targeting device, please help me Mr. Ice Man." Crunching numbers is useful and all but the main point of the game should be immersion in the RP of it all, and this requires for the game to actually be developed in all the places it should. This is also all related to why Sentinels suck in my opinion, because they're completely neglected too, it just gets treated like a training wheels Blaster when I actually do see a valid role for Sentinels even if it's not developed.

Help, this game is turning me into a communist or something. I mean, why would I want to live on Primal Earth when Praetorian Earth actually is kind of a lot better? Sure, there's a ridiculous personality cult around Marcus Cole and to a lesser extent the Praetors and Dr. Raymond Keyes... but it's hard to say Primal Earth doesn't have the same kind of thing, but even more ridiculous. As one of the NPCs put it, no one is saying Cole created the world and on the seventh day said it was good, but unlike them, why do I think I should care? Should we all praise Statesman and Positron and Synapse for keeping the world the same, but hate on Tyrant and Anti-Matter and Neuron for actually making it better even if they definitely let it get to their heads a little? It's not like they're making you go to the First Church of Cole or whatever, the Cole and other posters don't seem so different from the hero statues and posters in Paragon, but they did way more to earn it so the big egos just seem like a more understandable vice to me. I mean, in Praetoria the world runs on an anti-matter reactor! Hamidon and the Rikti aren't problems! Psychic people are common and accepted in society! Instead of a bunch of random gangsters running around the Seers put all the criminals in jail except the very most organized criminals who are less of a threat to society than a bunch of random gangsters anyway since they pretty much just want their money and that's it like the mafia in every mafia movie or show ever! The technology in general is way better and the architecture is huge and impressive (and a lot of it also reminds me of architecture I see in real life and enjoy, so that might be biasing me.) Screw the idea of starting characters in Praetoria and immigrating to Primal Earth, I kind of would rather just immigrate to Praetoria, not just start characters there because the story is fun, but like, other than the lack of certain utilities and day jobs in a lot of the maps, who wouldn't rather live in Neutropolis or First Ward than Kings Row or Croatoa? Who wouldn't rather hang out in Nova Praetoria or Imperial City than Atlas Park or Peregrine Island? Peregrine Island looks like a slum from the 1990s other than Portal Corp, and a couple of the big statues, which are just propaganda for keeping things like a slum from the 1990s apparently. Is this the real reason the game was cancelled the first time around, because it kept turning everyone into communists? So, umm, convince me that whatever is going on with the Ghouls is somehow way worse than whatever is going on with Longbow and I would never ever want to live on Praetoria because I am becoming kind of concerned for myself. It's one thing to think fighting the Syndicate or beating up the Resistance protestors, Seers, or both just because you can is way more fun than getting the Shining Stars to be patronized by Manticore, and another to be like, umm, what's so bad about this place anyway? It's way more advanced, more accepting of mutants, escaped science experiments, mages, aliens, and anyone else who's different, and all the Cole and Praetors and Dr. Raymond Keyes personality cult hardly seems different than what's on Primal Earth, but way more understandable if anything since they actually accomplished way more... Please convince me that the problems with Praetoria are somehow worse than there being some questionable socialist realist art on most of the walls instead of questionable impressionist art... yeah, the problems hardly seem worse in that respect either... Thanks!

This basically except I don't have a Darkness/Psi tanker that I play, I use psi melee on multiple other characters though. I don't think psi melee is a bad set but Insight could probably be improved and so could Boggle even though so far I've tried to use it. Psi Melee is probably not the worst set, the non-Stalker version has an early AoE too which is better than what most sets seem to get, and psi damage is generally really good even if it isn't so damaging against robots. Psi Melee has two AoEs if you're not a Stalker, all sorts of debuffs, all sorts of CC, and it's just fun to play despite Insight being basically useless and random and Boggle seeming like total jank even though I've been trying to play with it and procs.

Stealth and Hide stack. That applies to both Stalkers and VEATs. I don't care if an AT like controllers or VEATs isn't built around stealth, if some of the archetypes are capable of getting to really high numbers, let them have it, because when they took the options that got them to those numbers, they didn't take something else. If you're on a VEAT and you took full ranged and full melee, for example, you probably can't double-dip in leadership and also take the armor sets. Options do not make up for what you actually pick in actuality, what you actually pick should matter. This thinking is probably also why Sentinels still suck. Also, yeah, if there are barely any available +Perception bonuses to layer on in PvP on, say, blasters or dominators, and sometimes not even on defenders or controllers or some of the melee armor sets... *See thread title*

Maybe in open PvP but not 1v1. I mostly see stalkers in 1v1 and a few tanks or brutes, but mostly stalkers.

OK, so we can't have perception and stealth being exactly the same. Why not just give everyone the same caps for stealth and perception? Otherwise you're just killing stuff like Illusion Control. And ditto for mez. If you built your build around using mezzes you should probably be able to use that in PvP. Know what's really not fun? Having PvP be nothing but a bunch of stalkers, even if stalkers are fun to play, the lack of variety and lack of RP fights are both unfun. If something works in PvE it should work in PvP too even if it doesn't work exactly the same. Perception and Stealth also have some issues in PvE even if mez doesn't, hence why this wasn't just a PvP thread to begin with.

So Illusion controllers aren't literally built around having 1000-radius Stealth that's the same as what Stalkers get, you need to be able to see right through their illusions at all time? The fantasy of making illusions is the fantasy of PEW BANG goes the bang-bang pet, and not, you know, making illusions and tricking people? VEATs get two stealths that stack just like Stalkers, but they get a lower cap too? Come on, people are just not bothering to balance it because of the excuse that no one PvPs and that's it. Also Tactics still doesn't get you to max stealth and the only two IOs that give you +Perception give +100 each. The +Stealth IO gives you +300 from just one so if you stack that with any kind of group stealth and Hide you would be at the cap for Stalkers, never mind the arbitrary cap for non-Stalkers that exists despite the existence of illusion controllers and stuff that's really obviously supposed to have as much stealth as Stalkers. You can't just build a class around the idea of illusions and be like "by illusions we mean pets that shoot really big lasers, not actually deluding your opponent!" I think perception especially and to a lesser degree stealth should be in epic pools, though lots more classes and subclasses can max out stealth than perception already. It's still very weird to be on a straight psychic character or similar that's not a melee, and just not have perception, while a straight ice character can have it. People make psychic characters and also dark to have ESP, or tech-themed to have super targeting, meanwhile ice characters can see beyond the veil by... being in an ice cage? I'm actually not even sure why most melee characters would have increased perception or stealth on their armors at all since they can fight at close range anyway, that seems like something that should only go on a few ones thematically. Like even something like Savage Assault on Dominator doesn't get it when you have a mechanic called Blood Frenzy? But you can't smell blood? Yeah come on.

Different animals for Beast Mastery like all dinosaurs, all birds (even if they're flightless birds unless you add Group Fly,) and all aquatic animals. Even if this isn't Thunderspy and we have more than twelve people so we can't let people add whatever without overwhelming the server, maybe just let people change the costumes on the human Mastermind pets and have some different animals for Beast Mastery, different undead for Undead, and different demons for Demons, or you can change the costumes on those too (maybe within limits so people can tell what they are more easily like on the VEAT starting costumes.)

Yes, and if we had powers balanced properly no one would be able to PvP like that anymore except ten-year-olds whose parents walked away, because people could just PvP and say who's stronger if they had to, or do competitive PvE content. The result of having powers that are just wonky is people can make up whatever they want. The game should make sense so people can't just make up whatever they want. I like playing actual story content to refresh my brain and I think PvE, PvP, and RP should ideally all be the same. It's good PvP and PvE stats aren't the same I'm sure since that has broken other games, but still, there's way too much stuff that doesn't seem like it makes any sense at all when they split off PvP and PvE, like letting Stalkers have a higher stealth cap in PvP even though other classes can get the same stealth in PvE, and putting perception only on totally random things like on an ice cage but not on the psionic or dark version of the same power even though in regular non-epic sets psionic and dark usually have perception and stealth abilities more than ice. Lots of things in this gae seem somewhat buggy to me though I'd be willing to help fix them, I'm not here to be a Karen talking to the manager, so I should just go offer to do that.

RP, PvP, and the few enemies like Posi or Siren or maybe Arachnos that will make you feel it are not a weird thing to balance powers around. The point of the game is to get immersed in this world of superheroes, supervillains, and super-ambiguous people, or super ambiguously-people, in my opinion. I'm not trying to just either chew out the devs or make people scared of change though. I'd be willing to help work on it so I should probably get to turning in apps already, and I just want to see some things that seem neglected fleshed out, not anything that already exists removed. I don't think I'll post any more threads until I get on that, though I still want to request a couple more cosmetic things in the threads for that.

There are a couple of not often encountered enemies in PvE that can give you trouble, but still, why are PvE and PvP stats not the same in the first place? Breaks my immersion in both cases. Other people have commented on this. I'm willing to work on it personally. It's the same problem with sentinels, I don't want to look at the game like "if we just pretend..." because the game is supposed to take away the pretending for you. Everything should be properly balanced and I'm willing to help with that.

So Bio Armor/MA tank then?

- Psionic emotes and an aura like the Willpower leaping effect - Make Praetorian badges account-wide like Architect badges so I can make characters I didn't start out in Praetoria be from there and my Primal Earth psychic cop and spy characters can have all the cool Finder of Secrets and whatever badges instead of Defender of Justice - Add more day jobs in Praetoria like police etc. - Let you walk inside more buildings

I still think it's pretty weird you can make a character who's Psi/Psi/Psi or Dark/Dark/Dark and not get a single +Perception booster from any of your powers. Yes there's Rectified Reticle and Tactics, but that won't get you to max perception, even using Tactics, Rectified Reticle, and Warp won't get you to max perception unless you have a primary, secondary, or epic pool power with +Perception. Can't some of the psi and dark armors in Epic Pools and Patron Pools come with it? Right now the only one that has it is like Mace Mastery for Controller/Dominator and one that's not available to those classes has one on of all things Ice Mastery, but the Psionic Mastery and Dark Mastery for those pools doesn't have it even though most armors in psionic and dark sets do come with it. It's super weird right now that the only way Dominator can get max perception at all is Mace Mastery and Controller can do /Time as a secondary, but that's widely considered not to work super well with sets like Mind or Dark that involve a lot of clicking, and sets such as /Empathy and /Pain that are largely painted as the psychic set don't come with it. /Rad doesn't have a stealth debuff either which I would expect it to have at least even if putting +Perception on any of the powers might feel like overkill... So please just put more perception in epics, thanks! It's really easy to build around having max stealth: the entire class of Stalkers gets it and some control, support, and armor sets also have it, even though PvP stealth being capped low on all non-Stalkers seems like kind of BS. But it's really hard to build around having max perception to match that max stealth. Thanks!

I don't cap my characters at level 49. If there's older content I want to play I just go back and play it. You might as well cap your characters at level 6 or level 15 or the level of any other missions you want to play. This entire argument seems like it's basically just "Sentinels should be a weaker AT." I think their current role is fine but I just want to see the numbers buffed and their inherent tweaked or replaced entirely. I don't think everything in the game necessarily has to work, some sets will probably always have problems like Electric/Energy Dominator, but those are like, specific combinations of sets that are otherwise completely playable. You can still make a dominator using nothing but energy damage just on that class as long as it isn't those two sets. People tell you not to use certain combinations of sets on brutes too, like if you're using a melee with a commonly-resisted damage type or that's single-target you need to use a damaging armor set that isn't the same damage type that has AoEs, and that actually covers a lot more combinations you can't do than Electric/Energy on Dominator, which is just two sets. On Sentinel they probably just need to adjust the stats and let Sentinels have snipes since Blasters get them, Dominators get them, Stalkers get them, and even Scrappers get them. The problem right now is Blasters don't solely get melee attacks from their secondaries and Blasters also get armor, just not as much. If you're doing Ninjutsu on a Sentinel you might as well just play a Stalker and use the snipes or on a Brute and get Psionic Tornado or whatever your favorite AoE attacks are, plus maybe also the ones from Sorcery/Experimentation/Force of Will. A ranged class that can nuke and snipe but needs to wait around a lot so it has armor to encase or hide itself is actually a really coherent idea! The problem is Sentinels are just too nerfed in their current form to do that effectively. That really does just make it seem like Dominators do their role better since Dominators have to lock everything down and then do damage with nukes, and Dominators can get all sorts of armor from things that aren't their primary or secondary. I do think we have a coherent class role for Sentinels but they aren't good at it, so people just use them as a training wheels version of other classes. I've made three Sentinels and wanted to like them, they just feel like they aren't good at their role, and if you try to make them good at a different role they're still nerfed but there's an actual different class you can play instead. I don't like playing Corruptors or Scrappers among other classes, but like, Corruptors and Scrappers are still good. If Sentinel is like a nuke class and they have armor because all their damage is in the nukes, that sounds like it should be fun, and the inherent +Perception makes it sound like they should be much more strategic than Blasters or Scrappers, but they don't work out that way. By the way, I do actually care about +Perception a lot and I've taken powers including Tactics just to get more perception. I'm actually annoyed that a lot of controller and dominator powersets don't come with more +Perception and the only way to get to max perception reliably is to either use consumables or Mace Mastery. Like, can't any of the psychic armors or dark armors on Epic Pools come with more +Perception since I think characters leaning into psi and/or darkness would really want to maximize perception? As of now, I have a Mind Control/Psionic Assault/Psionic Mastery Dominator and none of those come with increased Perception. Playing a psychic without increased Perception feels kind of annoying, the only perception increases are the stuff like Tactics. So yeah I actually like increases to Perception a lot. Most of them also come with +ToHit and I like that too, makes it easier to play strategically with CC, debuffs, or even just well-timed nukes like what Sentinel seems to want to focus around. So the problems with Sentinel are probably actually related to the problems with +Perception, since the idea people would play super strategically seems to be overlooked itself in many ways.

Why not just play a Scrapper then? They get way more DPS and can just run through everything, plus the single-target ranged DPS is probably better than Vulnerability is anyway and they probably also have a bigger nuke from the epic pool too since it's just one nuke. I also mentioned I personally don't like playing Scrappers, though people aren't obligated to read that far, but everyone agrees Scrappers are useful and have good damage output even if they aren't into playing them. Same as what Rudra said where he said he likes Corruptors but not Defenders and I said I like Defenders but not Corruptors. It just seems like the roles for Sentinel are worse Scrapper, worse Brute, worse Blaster, or worse Defender. I don't know why you'd play this. I also have played tons of toons where the only power sets are psi damage so in the discussion of psi damage I haven't had that problem specifically with Sentinels, the problem is that it isn't clear what they're supposed to do and they just seem to end up being worse at everything, rather than in the middle of everything. World of Confusion is mostly a damage power in my experience, and it also stacks Confuse mags if you have any other powers that do Confuse. It's not about maxxing out that one power, it's about how they all work together. But whenever I've used it I've mostly loaded it with damage procs, which you mostly don't want to put on other Confuse powers because then you might draw aggro and you will definitely break your stealth if you have any. So if you melee enemies that already have Confuse on them or you apply it in melee you get big stacks of Confuse plus a lot of melee damage and they stay Confused. If you don't have any other Confuses I imagine it'd probably be pretty great as a damage proc power, but only if there isn't a better damage proc power for someone who isn't also using Confuse.

Yeah, this is basically why Sentinels suck imo. The stats on Sentinels suck and the epic pools suck. I say this as someone who plays extremely non-meta things all the time, like I have a Shield Defense/Psionic Melee Tanker that I think is fun. Someone said "play a Sentinel like a Scrapper" and aside from the fact I already mentioned I don't personally like playing Scrappers at all, Sentinel damage is just not comparable to Scrapper damage. Then add in the Scrapper epic pools and they're probably also doing better ranged damage than Sentinels anyway. I was comparing them more to Brutes because I play Brutes and not Scrappers and it makes the lower damage on Sentinels seem more acceptable, but that has the bad side effect of making the lower damage seem more unacceptable instead. Like if you want armor and AoEs just play a Brute and if you want to deal damage at melee and range just play Scrapper, Stalker, Blaster, or Dominator. Since I have a lot of Defenders even if none of them have admittedly been totally levelled and built out yet, Sentinels mostly end up feeling like bad Defenders to me, and their innate ability doesn't help. I also like the support ability Radiation Emission on Controllers and have been trying it on Defenders and that seems way better than Vulnerability. I think Sentinels would work fine as some kind of balanced class if they adjusted the stats somewhat and just went like "let's make this between a Scrapper and a Blaster" instead of "let's make this so it can't do support or tank," because basically no ATs are actually defined by what they can't do. I've been in entire conversations where one user on Everlasting (I know who and if you're on Everlasting you probably do too) was talking about how her Blaster was super good at -Resistance debuffs, healing, tanking, and pets, and I made a Dominator who's actually pretty good at buffing because I took all the buffing powers from Epic and Ancillary Pools, and also Dominators are already good at debuffs anyway, even the starting screen where you make one says that. If you just define Sentinels by "they need to be good at XY and bad at AB" then they're just going to turn out way worse than other ATs at everything because other ATs can basically dip into whatever roles you want to a lesser extent than the main thing, and people are always saying "don't pay attention to what the stat bars say for what an AT can do" all the time for a reason. Sentinels just seem designed to be bad at things that aren't their main roles and their main roles suffer because the stats have to be bad enough to justify that, rather than just making an AT with a certain level of armor and blasting and not seemingly nerfing everything else deliberately. "Sentinels are better at single target DPS" ...So basically what a Stalker turns into once they get the snipe, plus they can actually run into melee and can basically take whatever armor isn't something that's been totally nerfed or neglected since they don't need it for damage? Like, we don't need ranged ATs with armor when all the melee ATs with armor can already do range pretty well with Epic and Ancillary Pools, and we don't need ranged ATs with armor when regular ranged ATs all get as much armor as you'd actually take if you aren't running into melee and triggering procs all the time if you want it anyway. Rudra compared Sentinel attacks to Defender, and it still just feels like a worse Defender to me, and I think the fact I like Defenders OK even if I haven't maxxed any of mine out yet is why I get so annoyed with Sentinels. I don't like Corruptors much either unlike him, but also, Corruptors are actually good gameplay wise even if I personally don't like the feel of playing it, it's basically just designed for people who want to take all or most of the powers from the DPS set and not very many from the support set instead of all or most of them from the support set and not so many from the DPS set, and the stats, which he said don't matter at all, are a huge part of that, not just the order the powers are arranged in. Stats do matter, from someone who has a Shield Defense/Psionic Melee Tanker among other total jank builds that are just based on RP types of concepts and is obviously not minmaxxing.

That's probably a better power than what Kiros Nandelu has to be honest.

I like having fun in the game, but you still need to have OK stats to have fun in the game. If I can just make, like, a psychic blast/mental assault Blaster, have nearly the same survivability, and land a ton of debuffs and a few CCs, that seems a lot more fun than doing slightly less damage, dying slightly less, and not being able to do any of that. Sentinel still just seems like a training wheels blaster but also like it shouldn't have to be, since there are some fun ideas it seems like you could make. I mean I have a psychic blast/ninjutsu Sentinel that I wanted to give Ninja Tool Mastery to so I could have some weapons and steal and stuff but it still seems like that works better as a blaster or dominator who has a few melee weapon attacks, ranged psychic blasts and holds, and takes Concealment or something. Not sure how any of the armors actually work with the blast sets at all. There are damaging armors but the actual blaster secondaries have things like World of Confusion for /mental assault as well as just having the things from Epic pools such as mind probe and psychic shockwave. The damaging armors don't get enough damage compared to the assault secondaries in my opinion even if you have a fun theme.