Jacke

Multiple builds can be complex and expensive for a Level 50. They're a nightmare to manage while levelling. Partly due to the cooldown between swapping them, etc. Requires doing support like taking screenshots of tray layouts to keep the different builds as close to the same layout as possible. I find boosting works best when an enhancement aspect hasn't already gone deep into the ED adjusted ranges. A good example is the 5th IO in Purple sets, the Damage/Endurance Reduction one. It helps improve the Purple sets low total Endurance Reduction. And when wanting to make sure an enhancement aspect is deep into ED ranges, as with 2x L50 Common Recharge Reduction IOs in Hasten or other long recharge powers. Because of their reciprocal nature, enough boosting to get Endurance Reduction and/or Recharge Reduction into the 2nd or 3rd tier of ED is about the most that's worth while, because they will not significantly improve with more boosting.

Glad you enjoyed the film. About that line in your sig, @PeregrineFalcon: There's one of the members of my gaming guild, Repeat Offenders, who named his AR/Dev Blaster "Blamo the Clown". He--like AR/Dev--is awesome. 🙂

For some reason, I initially read the first part of your post as "I tend not to think about using Taunt on Hamilton....." and was immediately confused. 🙂 Everyone, if you take Taunt on a build, at what level do you get it?

And I suddenly remember what hit me in the feels. If you're a fan of a certain television show, you'll know it when you see it. 😞 Please hold off on spoilers for a while, preferably a few weeks. There's so many great scenes in this film that can be so easily spoiled. I'd prefer if people weren't even tempted by the presence of spoilers, especially as so many will be reluctant to go to the cinéma.

I just returned from seeing "Free Guy" (2021) in 3D. It's good. It's very good. Avoid any source of spoilers. Don't even watch the trailers. Just go see this film. Preferably in 3D. There's a lot of fantastic scenes. The overall story isn't too bad either. Imagine an NPC in a MMO became self-aware, but only with the knowledge they have to do their role in the game. But they start becoming aware of more. Ryan Renolds is that NPC. And it's fantastic. And I don't want to tell you any more because there are so many fantastic scenes that would be so easy to spoil. It's definitely good enough to see. One scene really really hit me in the feels. In a way few films have. And I can't remember which one!?! I recall the amazing scenes I do remember and it's not them. I can even vaguely recall the visuals, but not the dialogue. Damnation!!! I'll have to see it again. See this film.

Blame the Gold Standard Testers Discord: (It is really hard to copy something from Discord and not have it mangled. See below for the video.) I saw that exchange and I had to resurrect this debate. This is the third. Pineapple won the first and was deep fried in the second. Some historical background. In this case, as a Canadian, I can honestly say, if you hate the Blessed Pineapple on Pizza, you should blame Canada. And some expert opinion. How about a word from our previous supporters or opponents? @Bionic_Flea? @Jimmy? How about those from the Discord I can find here? @Cobalt Arachne? @PresidentDSG? @blaythesteuer? Who will win the third match? Will Pineapple rain supreme as it should? Or will pizzas be bereft of the noble fruit?

My sympathy for your loss. I still remember every pet I had and their loss. Pets are a member of our household, our family. You will grieve for them as much as it is for a parent, sibling, or child. Grieving is a bit different for everyone. Close to the loss, it can be strong or it can be dulled, especially if you're helping someone else. It will go away but will likely return. Often when you're alone or just with those close to you. And then you will be thinking and crying. Or something different. Sometimes you have to put it a bit aside because of something important. But don't always do that. Grief is a path that you will go down in your own way, but you really do need to go down it.

A bug-fix version has been release, 3.0.5.6, that seems to be working without issue.

I removed the Mids Reborn install, deleted all files and folders, and re-installed fresh. I install Mids Reborn to a non-standard location which gets mentioned in the first error popup, otherwise I get all of the above.

I get the same error.

It's good that Arcane Bolt now appears to be a decent attack of its own accord. It's been a while since I looked at other Pool attacks, but I think some are real dogs. Going on the Mids numbers (which can be wrong with respect to City itself), most aren't too bad for DPE, but all of them are horrible with DPA, such that I never take them except one of Boxing or Kick and that to get to Tough and then Weave. And only slot it to mule an IO set. It would be helpful if the Pool Powers at least matched Melee sets T1s like Shadow Punch's DPA. But those Pool attacks are off-topic for Page 2.

@Linea 🙂 That was me actually referring to the new Page 1 arcs, particularly the Hero-side one. 🙂 @Alty took a team of stormers including meself into that one at +1. But we had so much soft-control from Storm Summoning that we could stand the overheavy ambushes. Which apparently are getting tuned down.

What about Defensive Amplifiers? So most squishies if they want reliable Mez Protection have to fork out up to 2.5million Inf / hour. And gives them more build freedom! Yay....?

The current game can be plenty hard enough. Take a look at @Linea's 801 maps and work your way through them. I've fought in teams on a lot of them with well tuned toons and they are tough. Or the new arcs. They had some tuning issues like too many ambushes. I was on a team on the Hero-side one that lucked out and could stand them. Or even a lot of the other content at +4x8, like in Dark Astoria. City of Heroes can be made plenty tough. There's no need to add extra "difficulty" by brutally nerfing powers left and right.

I imagine it depends on the -Fly magnitude of mob attacks.

I use stealth (though rarely Super Speed stealth) a lot to move through maps. I've often found the map themselves to be the major obstruction, not the mobs. I don't thin Speed Phase will help there. I think the worse cases would be the various procedurally generated cave maps, especially the older ones (hello, Layer Cake Room, we meet again 😞 ) and the more recent Mot caves. Would need a standard set of them as well as some of the building maps. Then have time trial races from points A to B in each map. Times and qualitative feedback from those running them. How to set that up, I don't know how. I have found that when the run speed gets high enough, it can be a bit awkward getting through maps, to the point where excess speed wouldn't really help except on the rare clear straight passage. It's too bad there's no way to adjust top speed of motion besides using multiple powers of different speeds and adding and removing Sprint, etc.

How about the impact on Super Speed when used in indoor maps for stealth? If it's not enhanced, is it still controllable?

I think the numbers are so low because Sorcery is an Origin Pool as opposed to a Primary/Secondary Powerset. Besides the choice of Primary and Secondary--which are unchangeable but can be different on an alt--Power Pools choices are the tightest resource in a build, allowing only 4 and only 1 Origin Pool. To take on Titan Weapons or Radiation Melee+Fiery Aura only needs an experimental alt, A player has to learn about the power of Rune and decide it's an experiment worth taking up 1 Power Pool choice and 3 Power choices in a build that only has 4 and 24 of them to go around. In discussion with another player, they mentioned they start out in a build taking all 9 Primary and 9 Secondary powers, then the Leadership Pool and some of its powers, then they fill in. Other people do it other ways. Certain powerful build measures, especially those needing a Power Pool pick and thus excluding other Pools, are going to be slow to spread. Especially as other Power Pools have very powerful powers to improve a build and give it travel speed. Notwithstanding that, I do not think Rune is overpowered. Note that Corrupters builds had it the most. I'd bet that Defenders, Controllers, and Dominators are up there too. It was used to level the Mez playing field as well as another Resist Damage power for Resist IOs and IO sets, both of which are needed by squishies to shore up inherent weaknesses. We've had many players like @Luminara and @Linea give the history and experience of Mez in City of Heroes. From both the perspective of a game and from the comics source material, such a binary division, between those ATs that barely need to care beyond seeing their shield power is up and those who have to plan their builds and tactics around the very real threat, well, it's not right. For the weakest and easiest to tolerate / handle "Mez", Knockback, name me one comic-book superhero who's NEVER been knocked down or back. (Well, one who's not the next best thing to an Uber God.) I hope Mez gets some serious address soon.

I'm with @Wavicle here. I think Travel Suppression was added to prevent radical kiting jousting drive-by attacks in both PvE and PvP.

That would be awesome. 😄 Back before Shutdown, I did a detailed analysis of Choking Cloud as it would work on Defenders and Controllers, figuring out the effect of the two component holds it had. As it was then, it was actually not worth it on a Radiation Defender, only a Controller, just on the chance and duration of holds to overlap on Minions and Lieutenants. And of course the Controller got double damage from Mez. I had a Fire Control / Radiation Emission Controller from one of @TopDoc's SuperTeams. Overlapping Choking Cloud and Hot Feet was great, mobs held and damage doubled from Containment. Until the toon got Mezzed and all that was gone. Exactly. The concern is as binary as the effects. I think thoughts should turn to not just fiddling with Mez but actually doing a rebuild on it. Unlikely, as it would require tweaking so many player powers and NPC mobs and their powers. Would need new coding to handle the effects. And of course stronger feedback than Pages 1 and 2 combined. I think it was @Linea that thought of this variant, where Mez is never binary, always a scale of effects. Holds and Immobilizes as we know now would be replaced with -Recharge and Slows that ramp up to where the target can't use powers and can't move. Maybe have some powers have both effects. I've thought of other ways to extend this: Fears as a combination of -ToHit, -Damage, and Knockback. Confuse as a combination of -ToHit and -Damage with targetting on team members. Make the degree of the mez effects variable, as the recent changes have done to many powers. And give all players and mobs a variable resistance to these effects. Take that idea, design it out, then develop it down to the simplest system that with the right settings can make things understandable, challenging, and never completely certain for any toon what's going to happen when they hit or are hit. That's a great example of thinking outside of the MMO Box. Problem is even for the smoothest rebuild, it would be a lot of work, need a lot of testing and tuning, and in an established game like City of Heroes would get a lot of irritated and griefing response. But I think at least Mez needs that level of rethink and rebuild.

But what about squishy toons that have to fight at melee ranges, like Radiation Blast? Or when you in a map corridor and there's no place to stay out of range? I keep squishies upright in Dark Astoria at high difficulty and on @Linea's 801 AE maps (which he always runs at +4x8). I know about strategy and tactics. I've played with Repeat Offenders since 2005 and they along with @TopDoc wrote the book on tailoring strong team builds and making them work during play. But what about when you want or have to play solo? And all those affect-others-only powers are dead weight when soloing. And the game has been made a lot more solo friendly over the years.

But @Bionic_Flea, I can't believe you passed up "<Yoda> Begun the Nerf Wars have! </Yoda>" I agree, I am concerned with the possibilities of what could happen. I think and hope it's unlikely it'll all be mostly bad. As for i27p2, I have Sorcery on a lot of my toons and after this Issue goes live, I'll mull over what to do with them. Just to cut down on respecs, I wish I had a better idea what was coming. Yes, but all the parts of the game were made with many other features in mind. All those Mez-heavy groups got made to be a bigger challenge as you levelled. The one-shield-at-a-time feature of Issue 0 made that a different headache for all characters. But it was only really fixed for Melee ATs, then later Blasters. Everyone still has to worry about Mez, but some ATs worry a whole lot less. And then there's groups like the Cimerorans, who as I recall aren't heavy on the Mez themselves but do a lot of their own Mez protection with Shout of Command. And a lot of -Def to make all non-Resistance builds without enough Defense Debuff Resistance sweat. Which then means having to go with 2 Destinies, Ageless Radial for the DDR and Clarion Core for the Mezzing, but only one at a time. 'Course, under Level 45, have to find other mitigations. What would Real Super Heroes do in these circumstances? Take a pass on many non-perma long-recharge powers as too situational. Not up often enough for the easy stuff, may not be needed for the middlin' mobs, don't last long enough for the hard challenges. And shell out Inf for the Defense Amplifiers. As @Luminara pointed out, Blasters are the least squishy of the squishies. They have the highest Base HP (about 18% higher than most) and Max HP Cap (about 15% higher than most), most being Defenders, Controllers, and Dominators, with Corruptors a bit higher and Masterminds a lot lower on Base HP. Which means Blasters get the most out of +%HP buffs and the 75% Resistance cap. It's not much, but every bit of damage mitigation (Defense, Resists, HP+Absorb+Heals+Regen) helps. Then they get the best Mez mitigation tools of all the squishies. And as you mentioned, the strongest attacks to defeat threats the fastest. Buffs and Debuffs can be very powerful, but they have to be handled well and only truly shine on coordinated teams. Otherwise, the game as it is now is kind of Tank+Spank on Speed Pool. Aggro holding on the toons who can take the punishment the best while many mobs get Mezzed themselves (will no one think of the poor Minions!) and everyone burning down the house. Then onto the next group of victims villains. 'Course hit an AV or even some EBs or a lot of Bosses especially with special mechanics and things often go pear-shaped. But if it's in the Incarnate range and / or the team / league is even reasonable, they can often approach the scorched-earth of taking out the Mooks. Of course, they should really cut their teeth on some of @Linea's 801AE missions to really take their game to the next level. The game has changed. And it does play a lot differently solo, where it's more like City of Heroes way back when, where you have to take every attack with care. I have an Incarnated Dark/Rad/Dark Defender who can just take +4x8 Dark Astoria if I'm on my game and using all my tools. And that includes Rune of Protection. When I get the time and energy after Page 2 goes live, I'll see how well he still plays.

It does help to use the Handyman's Other Secret Weapon: Team Breakfrees. Which have 3-minute duration. And may even help another member on your team. 🙂 When leveling a toon, I eventually switch to them just because of the duration packed into a single Inspiration.

I agree, a proper solution to the problems with Mez are complex. But in another post, I actually thought of a hack that could fix Mez, albeit not as good as a complete redesign but in a minimally disruptive way. The way it was fixed for one AT: Blasters. Allowing them to use their Primary T1 and T2 and Secondary T1 attacks even while Mezzed. And the ATO Enhancement set Defiant Barrage including a special proc that builds up a Mez protection shield. This way Mez doesn't take away all of Blasters' agency and they can react and burn their way out of it. Copying the fix for Blasters to other ATs isn't the best solution for Mez, but it is a minimum modification solution that's already implemented for Blasters and working. It would need adjustment, but it could be made to work without radically breaking the existing game. And fixing Mez has to be at or near the top of a lot players' personal City Fixes Wishlists. So how about it?

I like the change making resistance being present when used under Mez. I do not like the reduction in duration. It's nerfing a major Mez mitigation tool without other changes to Mez to make it less of a mess (which it definitely is right now and has been since City of Heroes' launch). It's also doing a change to an Origin Pool power, where Origin Pools are mostly down with the Presence Pool in being marginal and more for a specialist or experimental build. It's also reducing good build diversity when changes should ideally improve that. Thanks for the PvP perspective. I feel that problems in PvP matter for PvE as well, as it's a strong indicator that there's an issue with the power.