srmalloy

I agree. At least theoretically, the role of a Defender was to support their team, keeping them alive; an inherent that gives them an Endurance discount when they're failing at their job seems horribly backwards -- with a well-played Defender, they would rarely if ever get any benefit from their inherent. All the other ATs have inherents that they can take advantage of during 'average' play; only Defenders have an inherent that doesn't help them unless things fall in the pot.

You don't have to go full villain; it's sufficient to go vigilante, but if you do that, you can't start the arc yourself, but have to join the team of a villain/rogue running the arc. There are often people announcing their running patron arcs and soliciting team members, so that's not a big drawback.

Or 'Flagrum', which is more specifically the Roman scourge -- but it is still a type of whip. You could also substitute 'Clades' or 'Plaga', but those carry other connotations that may not translate well. Or 'Punire Rubrum', although Google Translate does not handle the conjugation properly, and simply translates 'punire' as 'punish', even though it is the nominative gerund form, not the verb.

It was changed for the prestige flight powers, so I'm pretty sure it can be done. For the various missions where you do the mission as someone else (Matthew Habashy's 'enter the Hellion Safe House' mission, Sandra Costel's 'Speak with Deborah Rosenfeld' mission, Heather Townsend's 'personal mission', etc.), can they be changed to suppress your toggles, rather than turning them off completely?

One of the tweaks I would like to see done with hunts is to take the "Find information on [goal]. Defeat [number] [group]" missions, where the end-mission text is always "On one of the [group] you defeated, you found [information]", and alter them so that the goal information can 'drop' from any of the mobs you defeat for the mission, so that you may not have to grind through the whole roster of thugs to get what you're after. Use a sliding chance for it to drop, so that it's unlikely to drop from the first one you defeat, but gets more and more likely as your defeat string rolls on. That way it feels more like you're out roughing up thugs until you get what you need, not a 'beat up all these thugs, and you got the information you wanted from the first one you beat up, but you kept on beating them up just for kicks' thing -- the former feels more like a hero/rogue thing, the latter more of a villain/vigilante thing (teach them not to try to hide things from you).

If it's just based on the Red Skull, then taking the idea of German from back up the thread, 'Rote Geißel' (probably have to enter it as 'Geissel', since I don't think the character name entry will take an eszet). But slapping 'Red Scourge' into Google Translate and picking different destination languages until you see something you like is an option -- Latin gives you 'Flagellum Rubrum', for example.

Make the six-piece set bonus for the Corruptor ATOs include raising the HP threshold at which the server starts doing scourge checks.

I was doing Aaron Thierry's arc in the Argosy Industrial area of Atlas earlier today; the Tac Ops and Wolf Spider mobs were respawning reasonably well, but the Huntsmen spawns for the next mission were really slow to respawn. This mission and the next to take down the pylons were not helped by a Fire blaster/sentinel who seemed to be determined to leech off the work I was doing, firing a couple shots into whatever I was attacking before dashing off; I'd seen him at Thierry, so I'm pretty sure he had the same missions. I eventually just moved out of the way, switched to an alt, and played them for about an hour, until I figured that he'd moved on. But I was seeing the same thing you were -- of the spawns that would normally be populating, at most a quarter of them were getting respawns, and those were taking extra time. It made getting the explosives crates easy, but that was about the only good thing about it.

And no procs that could be affecting other mobs?

I'm pretty sure that there would need to be a major rework in how the Ouro arcs, including Flashback arcs, work for this to happen. From other threads on the forums, I'm pretty sure that it's been looked at, but that it's been put off until there are more resources to throw at the problem..

What about giving their debuffs the same Scourge effect they get for damage? For most of a fight, it's not going to have any effect, and in teams mobs go down so quickly that there's little time for it to make much difference. You'd really only see it fighting the 'sack of HP' mobs like AVs and GMs that stay in the Scourge range longer.

Their music isn't that bad... 😉

In the same tone that declares a mission you can set to +0x1 and zip through in a couple of minutes, fighting only the single mob at the end, to be 'plainly abusive'. For my Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers, running that mission and the rest of the arc gets them about a veteran level per run at x4, scaling up to +4 as they get incarnate level boosts; it's a reasonable way to grind veteran levels, and I see on the forums that the arc is highly recommended for speed running to get the end rewards without worrying about XP in the process.

At least tweak the first group of missions so that you're discovering some coherent activity the Clockwork are working toward, rather than just being a pack of murder hobos breaking into labs and destroying everything you find.

It's a 'pointless maze' because it's the tenth, or fifteenth, or twentieth (or more) time that you've done it; it's no longer your character's first exposure to the altered ecosystem of Dark Astoria. The arc fills a specific purpose in the storyline of the zone. If the arc is so boring and abusive, you don't have to keep running it over and over again through the Pillar of Ice and Flame. If you want to bitch about something that's 'plainly abusive and way too boring', complain about the stack of 'defeat all Clockwork in [location]' missions that lead off the Synapse Task Force.

It's become pretty obsolete by this point, but the original premise was that, as a potential challenger for Lord Recluse, your character worked their way up the 'food chain' of villainy under the loose observation of Arachnos, lackeying to more and more powerful thugs as you gained levels, until you reached a point where you could choose to ally yourself with one of Recluse's more-or-less-trusted lieutenants. Because this was intended to be a defining choice for the character (originally, picking a patron was a one-and-done decision that couldn't be changed), the patron pools for an AT were deliberately built to be grossly similar to make the choice of patron a role-playing decision rather than a min-max 'flavor of the month' pick.

Or amend the punctuation -- "We're going to need your help more -- a lot more -- on this one..."

This is why anchor buffs/debuffs were changed to remain active until the mob they're anchored to despawns, so if they're defeated quickly, their effect remains for a while. This won't help you if you chose to put your anchors on mobs that don't leave bodies when defeated -- ghosts, Tsoo Ancestor Spirits, Rikti drones, BP masks, etc. -- but does give you more time if your teammates insist on whacking the anchors first.

I threw together a small popmenu to clean up the menu bars a bit on my Grav/Time/Primal Controller. What it does is take four macros -- 'Here', 'Zoom', 'Boom', and 'Pull', adds the basic Wormhole function, and puts them all in one menu. The four macros are different presets for Wormhole: Here -- drop the targeted mobs in front of my character Boom -- throw the targeted mobs as far away as possible (camera aim) Zoom -- throw the targeted mobs straight up as far as possible Pull -- Yank the targeted mobs as far behind my character as possible The last one is for pulling mobs out of a big spawn to teammates waiting behind my character, since Wormhole does not appear to generate aggro. The whole file is just the above commands and a basic 'powexecname' command, with hotkeys '1' through '5' for the options: // Menu "Wormhole" { Title Wormhole Option "Wormhole &1" "powexecname Wormhole" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation 0:10 Wormhole" Option "Zoom &3" "powexeclocation up:max Wormhole" Option "Boom &4" "powexeclocation cam:max Wormhole" Option "Pull &5" "powexeclocation back:max Wormhole" } Wormhole.mnu

The class trinity goes back to D&D, and was incorporated into Everquest, then WoW; it's a simple "this is your role in the team" division that was easy for people to grasp when they started playing a game. It became the "holy trinity" with WoW's success -- the designers of other MMOs wanted to make it as easy as possible to switch from WoW to their MMO, so they copied WoW's class system, and over time it got enshrined as the way MMOs 'had' to work. It has been tested over time, its problems are well-known, and there is a large number of developers looking at problems. It also makes encounter design easier, since you know what the classes bring to the fight. And it enhances replayability, since the same content plays differently for each role. On the downside, it restricts how players interact with the game, and too slavish an adherence can choke player choice, and some roles may not work well shifting between solo and group play. And even when there are options to diversify the role of a character or class, the expectation of "You're an X, so you have to be role Y" in the community may funnel players away from taking advantage of the character design options the game provides. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of whether a game design can be made attractive enough that its divergence from the 'holy trinity' isn't perceived as a bar to joining the game. And a lot of game development companies are loathe to do anything truly innovative out of fear of being perceived as too different, so we keep getting games that are trinity-based with some customization slapped onto the side.

Tails appear to be a problem with a lot of the model-replacement temp powers -- the earliest you see it is in Matthew Habashy's arc in AP when you get a Hellion/Girlfriend from Hell disguise to go into a Hellion safe house and find what they've collected; you'll retain any tail your character had prior to entering. The original devs addressed this with the Halloween temp costumes, but it seems to have been missed elsewhere.

Or Hellion Golf in AP before Enhancement Diversification -- six-slot Power Thrust for KB, add Power Boost, and punt Hellions across Atlas Park.

One possibility is that it builds up a reservoir of adrenalin as the power continues, then dumps it into your system when it turns off.

One of the options would be to make these a pool with the travel power having selectable FX for a rocket board or void skiff or carpet, and the other powers in the pool all be defined as coming from the 'vehicle', with varying effects based on the flight FX -- a blast that has a rocket or energy bolt or tiny whirlwind, some sort of force field effect, etc. The pool would still have the special effect of making the rest of your abilities 'only affects self'.