srmalloy

Just curious; in powers that do knockback, is there something stopping you from slotting the Sudden Acceleration KB->KD IO, which isn't unique, since the fact that they do do knockback is the feature that is being railed against? Or is it only being able to get the benefit of one set of set bonuses from Overwhelming Force that's the real issue, and turning KB to KD is the straw horse used to argue for the enhancements in the set being stripped of their unique status? How many powers do knockback but have the knockback unenhanceable, and therefore can't take Knockback sets?

But his skills can't compare to those of a master of the ancient Korean martial art of Shit On You... 😁

Not just that, it implements a known exploit category, where a player creates a character with an AT/powerset combination known to be easy to level, gets them to level cap, and 'respecs' into an AT/powerset combination that's difficult to play well before level cap. With the ready availability of leveling tools, including AE farms, and the 1000-character-per-server pool, you can make the arguement that the ability to do complete AT/powerset changes is already in the game; it just costs you all your levels, so you start off as a new level 1 character with the AT and powersets you want.

I see. You choose a powerset that you know has knockback baked into virtually every attack, but it's apparently enough of a rude shock and surprise that it actually does, in fact, incorporate knockback into virtually every attack, and that you have to devote an enhancement slot for each power to have it not do knockback is a punishment for somehow having been forced to choose that powerset with all of its unwanted knockback, because it requires a style of play that's different from what you wanted.

that's how it works now; any KB of mag less than 1 is knockdown, and the KB->KD IOs apply a multiplier of, IIRC, .001 to the knockback magnitude of the power they're slotted in.

They get really crappy mileage, and if you've ever ridden in one, you'd realize how cramped they were on the inside; riding with a Stone tanker with Granite on is like playing Twister with a rock wall.

What if we've already rated you "boastest"?

"The secret compartment of my ring, I fill with an Underdog super energy pill."

Balance. If you give the ability to, say, go to Null and turn all your knockback into knockdown, and regard this as an improvement to your powers, then what do you give to players with non-KB powers to give them the ability to make a similar degree of improvement to their powers?

Depends. Alaska Airlines, for example, makes their management periodically eat the food served on their flights, so that they're aware of the quality of what the passengers are getting. Other airlines don't bother, and wind up serving food that compares poorly against hospital food (and having worked at a Navy hospital for thirty years, I'm very aware of the quality of the food the galley serves.)

You mean, like the arena combat mode where you select your 'team' from the NPCs that you have unlocked with your Gladiator badges? Who would have thought that it might be there already... Well, except for pitting AV-level mobs against each other, but that's a difference in degree, not in kind.

"Dear sir. I am seated in the smallest room in my house. Your request is before me. Shortly, it will be behind me."

It is less good than it was before, back on Live, when the devs handed out ranged attacks to essentially every mob in the game to address the issue of hoverblasting, where a flying/hovering Blaster could hang in the air above spawns, out of range of their melee attacks, and grind them down with impunity. I could make the argument that they went too far, with many mobs having ranged attacks that outrange a snipe attack with Boost Range active, but that's a separate issue. Before ranged attacks became 'universal' among NPCs, knockback was a ready source of mitigation -- knock a mob away from you, and you had until they got back into melee range to shoot at them. But as a general tool, it requires more skill to use effectively, but knockback is an effective herding tool if you exploit the geometry of a mission -- firing off a cone with knockback to push mobs into a corner, where they cluster up for other AoEs. But just knocking mobs away from the melee team members usually doesn't help the situation unless you're doing it to give them time to recover, as the ranged attacks are generally wimpier than the melee ones. However, "disrupting the team" is not a feature confined to knockback, as anyone with a tank or brute who has run into a room with mobs scattered around the room, hit them with a taunt... and then discovered that they're all stuck scattered around the room, because the controller on the team has fired off an AoE immobilize before anyone else can attack, and before the mobs can be grouped up to make it easier to defeat them... and has this happen over and over and over again during missions and TFs.

And there are too many of them for the number of Cimeroran Traitors we encounter. But when you make it a mob-rank designation, rather than a role title, you're going to get things like that -- one of the shortcuts that the original devs took with Cimerora, along with kicking Roman naming conventions to the curb, although I expect that the formality of referring to others by their proper names fell out of general use after Cimerora was drawn off into the sea of time and isolated -- "N. Fabius Q. F. M. N. Furia Gnatus Maximus" (Numerius Fabius Maximus, son of Quintus, grandson of Marcus, born of Furia) would be too unwieldy to wave around in conversation, even when formally introducing the player to a new individual. I just toss it into the same pile of things that gnaw at me about the game but aren't really important enough to fix, like the problem with the buoys in the harbors.

They would probably have hated to have me on and lose; my reaction to something like this is "I lost. Okay, I could have won this... and been taxed for winning it. But how am I worse off than if I hadn't played?"

If you go back and dredge old posts, you'll find a bug report about the vines going away, and a followup post from one of the HC staff that this wasn't intended, and would be fixed. Like you, I recolored the power for all of my Plant Manipulation characters, and just assumed that they hadn't found where to tweak the power to make the vines stay, or it got pushed back in priority behind other things. Since it was a purely cosmetic issue, I didn't pay attention to it.

...after which people will bitch, moan, and whine about knockback versus regular mobs, and there will be calls to reduce knockback effects on regular mobs. And after that, people will bitch, moan, and whine about knockback versus resistant mobs, and there will be calls to reduce knockback even more. Repeat until the only option is to remove knockback entirely, at which point all development staff time goes to rebalancing all of the powers that did knockback to account for the fact that knockback is being taken out of the game, and issuing a free respec to all characters so that anyone who's chosen powers with knockback and/or slotted powers with knockback enhancements can restructure their characters...

He can handle any type, as long as it's negative...

As Glacier Peak said, there are players on those servers who are invested in their characters and don't want a merge, with all of the name collisions that would entail. But since you're so gung-ho for it, we'll make sure that all your characters are tagged with 'vulnerable to losing name' in the event of name collisions in the event server merges do occur.

And some of the DP visuals showing the bullets being fired into the air and arcing down to strike their targets doesn't? There are quite a few aspects of the game that require, not merely suspending, but hanging, drawing, and quartering disbelief.

And it seems it was someone playing with Wormhole, as I ran across them actually doing it while I was on a Fake Nemesis loop through PI.

Particularly because it falls under the same truncated misquotation problem as "money is the root of all evil" ('The love of money is the root of all evil'). The original quote is "An it harm none, do what thou wild be the whole of the law."

To misquote Robin Williams, "If they're wet, they must be ready"...

Not to mention that there would have to be protections built into a copy function if you could transfer a base including all of its stored items to prevent it from being used to dupe the storage. I can hear the screaming now if you could set up a base on a 'mule' server, cram its storage full of huge inspirations, purple, PvP, ATO, and winter enhancements, and then copy it back to your primary server again and again, giving you an infinite supply of these enhancements. I could see a 'move storage contents' option, where anything in storage was transferred to the new server and deleted from the original one, but copy should die the real death.