Maelwys

Same, FWIW. Unfortunately... that label isn't always particularly good indicator of what a person finds funny or acceptable, how thick their skin is, or where they sit on the sliding scale between "prideful/holier-than-thou/prosperity-gospel/get-the-heck-out-of-my-pew-we've-been-sitting-here-for-generations" and "humble/chief-of-sinners/dirt-poor-suffering-servant/can-I-give-you-the-shirt-off-my-back". Example: I'm from Northern Ireland, which is a lovely place where two sets of supposedly-Christian groups have been knocking the absolute stuffing out of each other for decades because a bloke named William liked Orange tictacs and they prefer Green ones or something equally ridiculous. One of our country's major claims to fame is that we have some of the best joint surgeons on the planet because the eedjits can't go five minutes without putting bullets through each other's kneecaps. OK, things have supposedly been on pause since 1998, but it's still it's all themmuns' fault, they started it and we don't want their sort 'round here. Personally I find "Life of Brian" downright hilarious; I'm pretty self-depreciating with a black sense of humour, I have a large threshold for profanity and for what some might consider verbal heresy, and it takes a *lot* to rub me up the wrong way enough to break out the metaphorical pitchforks. But I have a few friends who went protesting outside the cinema waving placcards and chanting "Down with this sort of thing!" whenever 50 Shades of Grey hit the screens. The old George Orwell quote is unfortunately often quite accurate: "As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." It's usually difficult to find someone online who argues that Jesus was a bad person; but you'll find plenty of people that argue that Christians are bad people. And I'd be right at the top of that list. (Because I believe that I'm fundamentally (ha!) a bad person, who has been saved by Grace... although I fully recognise that other's Milage May Vary) However as a result, if anyone posts something like "please stop X/Y/Z it offends me because I'm a Christian"... heckles can get raised. Best case, you'll end up with a bunch of folk thinking "why are they bringing something so off topic as religion into the discussion forums for a fantasy RPG?". It's similar to bringing up political beliefs, but with a few thousand years of hate, bigotry and martyrism thrown in for good measure. It might look like a nice broad road to take... but... just don't. Even if you're lugging your cross behind you. Now. ALL THAT SAID, the General Chat Channel is a wretched hive of scum and villainy (and heroes, rogues and vigilantes). You must be cautious.

Also in the BBS, Usenet and IRC eras, if someone actually made the effort to connect to the interwebs and join a particular subforum/group/etc then chances are they were invested enough to treat being shamed/excluded/banned as a bad thing; so it was a suitable deterrent. Then over time, someone invented myspace and youtube comments and trolling somehow changed into a badge of honour; if not an outright art form. Looking back through the rose-tinted lenses, I seem to recall the most the old CoH forums ever had to put up with was the odd "/jranger" and "Gone to the Americans!" interspersed with endless 😉 from Golden Girl. It was almost relaxing. Sure, there was the occasional thread full of people completely freaking out over something objectively hilarious, such as someone spawning the Malta Titan on top of a Hamidon Raid. But in my defence it was just that one time and you all had it coming.

It's not good game design, but it can be good build design. Most good builds get better when you slot procs into them. As others have pointed out, it's always a balancing act because any slots taken up by procs won't be granting you better raw +enhancement numbers or (usually) set bonuses... but in most high-end builds there is a bit of leeway there. Often you can get "all you need" from an attack power with just 3-4 slots - so why not use the others for procs? The annoying thing for me is the interaction of procs with recharge enhancement % in the power itself (e.g. in order to get the most out of a damage proc, you want to raise its liklihood of activating... which you do by lowering the recharge% enhancement slotting for that attack to the bare minimum needed to keep an unbroken attack chain going). To my mind this is messy and counterintuitive and I'd very much rather that all +recharge % was ignored for PPM calculations, not just global +recharge %. Thankfully CoH was never balanced around IOs, let along procs. Even "Hard mode" quests can be handled by a bunch of toons using only SOs (as long as the characters are reasonably well built and buffs are liberally employed) Incarnate trials are similar - although having higher-tier incarnate abilities is *almost* required in some of them due to how helpful the level bump is. All that said, I do have a VEAT Crab Soldier called "Proc Lobster".

Bonfire behaviour in Release Candidate 2 appears unchanged from Release Candidate 1. Compared to live: slightly less bouncy, smaller radius, now requires accuracy for the damage component. And it still has the wrong duration (30s instead of 45s; which may be intentional but isn't listed in the patch notes)

Bonfire from the MM Epic Pool still has the wrong duration. (30s down from 45s; which may be intentional but is not listed in the patch notes)

The OP lucked out and caught Luminara on a good day, so all the important bits have already been covered. 2c follows. This is the build design aspect of "attack chains" in a nutshell. Choose several attack powers that you want to rotate, then look closely at the ones with the longest recharge times. You'll want these powers to be fully recharged by the time the others attacks in the chain are finished animating (and adding up the animation times accurately is where "arcanatime" comes in). "Hard mode" is figuring out the damage-per-animation-time (DPA) of each of your attacks and making sure that the attacks with the highest DPA get used as often as possible. "Expert Mode" is the same as hard mode, but also factors in things like damage buffs / resistance debuffs (since often it will make more sense *not* to use the highest-DPA power if your buffs/debuffs need refreshed instead - Claws "Follow Up" is a good example of this). +Recharge buffs can sometimes be useful to include here too. "Ludicrous Mode" is breaking out the spreadsheets for Damage Proc likelihood (PPM) calculations (where you need to balance "recharge rate reduction" slotting in each power so that your damage procs activate more often) and figuring out what T4 Interface Incarnate slot will work best (and it's not ALWAYS one of the Degenerative flavours!). --------------------- However after you do all that, you'll still need to actually play the character and rotate through the attack chain. This can have its challenges, because not all attack chains are created equally. Some characters will have very simple repeating optimal attack chains (such as a high-recharge Katana Scrapper - Gambler's Cut -> Soaring Dragon -> Gambler's Cut -> Golden Dragonfly) but others can be infuriatingly complex (the best I could get an old Axe Tanker of mine down to was 9 steps Chop -> Cleave -> Swoop -> Chop -> Gash -> Cleave -> Chop -> Swoop -> Gash). CoH doesn't have "sequential power activation scripts"... the closest you can get are binds/macros that activate multiple toggles. Clicky powers are trickier. But there are a few lifehacks that can help to automate activating a large bunch of clickies. One option is to use keybind text files - this will let you mash a single button on your keyboard/joypad/etc that cycles through all of your attacks and tries to activate each one in turn. However the more powers used in your chosen attack chain, the more times you'll have to mash that chosen button in order for the bind sequence to "find the right power". You can get around this somewhat by setting the button itself to 'Turbofire' (either via a hardware gaming keyboard/joypad/whatever setting, or via something like a GlovePIE script) but it'll only ever work as fast as your computer can load up the text files. So there'll always be a chance of a slight delay between power activations; which is why manually activating one attack and queueing up the next is always going to be the way to go if you care about bleeding-edge maximum damage output (most don't, so sequental keybinds are often "good enough"! 😁 ) An alternative option (which can also combine nicely with the bind files!) is to use the green "autofire" feature that is built into CoH. If you hold down the "Control" key and click on one of the powers in your tray, it'll put a green circle around it. That power will now automatically try to activate whenever it is recharged + has a valid target. This only works for a single power at a time, but if you use it on a decent-damage fast-recharging attack then it can often be enough to fill in any gaps in your chain and over time it'll save you an awful lot of button mashing.

I played STO, and this always cracks me up. How on earth was anyone on that Dev team surprised? The holodeck misbehaves on the shows almost every other episode!

I may have missed out a "😜" smiley and/or sarcasm HTML tags in my OP. (That said, I seem to recall a certain expletive-laden comment from BackAlleyBrawler whilst observing players combining Howling Twilight and Oil Slick during Hamidon raids... we always managed to surprise the devs somehow) 😇

You just know that there's someone out there with an Empath/Archery Defender that specialises in administering curative suppositories... 🏹 🚑 👨‍⚕️

I'm sure different people will have different takes on it, but I always looked on "Frankenslotting" as what heppens when you "mix" IOs (e.g. some sets, some basics, whatever) as opposed to using a "Full IO set" (which is nice and clean and surely the the dev-intended "right" way of doing things...) That doesn't necessarilly mean that you need to fill every single enhancement slot with a different type of enhancement; it's enough as long as there are at least some visible stitch marks and/or duct tape. Dr Vahzilok would be proud. There are an awful awful lot of builds out there with 6-slotted full IO sets and nothing else; some people honestly can't see past "full set = always best".

I'm 132% confident that my builds are properly slotted... 🙃 More seriously, I'm a OCD powergamer across all games, tabletop or computerised... ...which basically means that I'm a complete spreadsheet junky and numbershead but not a "spoiler or shamer". I enjoy completely grokking the underlying mechanics of a game and learning abilities/powersets in exhaustive detail. And min/maxing. However I don't particularly like being the star of the show and I certainly don't like causing my teammates to have less fun. So I'll often roll up a "sub par" (powerset combinations that are considered underperforming/conflicting/bad) and/or "support" (team buffing) character and then push its mechanical performance as far as I possibly can. And whenever I'm on a team I'll typically hang back unless I'm being called upon to tank (in which case you can bet that I'll be leading the way, virtually unkillable and keeping everything tightly bunched up for AoEs; and playing merry havoc with the concept of the aggro cap via pseudopets and mez effects). For City of Heroes, that has translated to things like a creating a viable Spines/DA scrapper that simply could not run out of endurance back in i9 (unheard of at the time), Blasters that got around the T9 Nuke recovery crash by using *Rise of the Pheonix* or *Drain Psyche* as part of their regular attack chain, one of the first melee-defence-softcapped Electric "Blappers", a Katana/Regen scrapper that outdamaged Claws/ (due to -res and damage procs), a INV/SS Tanker who could go toe-to-toe with Ghost Widow and the Clockwork King, a Peacebringer without Nova form who still put most Fire blasters to shame, and a Sonic/Elec Defender that was instrumental to scoring quite a number of team "firsts" (e.g. MoSTF) on the server in question and almost clocked up more playtime than all my other toons put together... And much more recently; taking *Repel* on a toon that has no native Resistance/Defences or Mez Protection (a Bot/Kin MM which can keep its henchies alive unaided whilst ploughing through groups of +4/8 faster than a Brute, even *without* abusing Bonfire). Oh, and a /RA Scrapper that has Softcapped positional defences, Hardcapped S/L resistances, and more effective Maximum HP than a Tanker with Dull Pain up and greater self-healing over time than a /Regen. I'm a firm beleiver in "frankenslotting" - not using full 6-piece IO sets everywhere; but instead 3 or 5-slotting to get more useful procs, set bonuses or raw enhancement % numbers. And also in taking "Confront" on Scrappers... 🥴 Now, if you ask me if I'm confident in my costumes, that's another question entirely... one of my coalition Supergroups back in the day was called "the Iconites" for a very good reason, and I rather suspect more inf has been spent on tailor fees over the years than on respecs!

The latest revision of the patch that went live a few hours ago has altered Bonfire yet again. I've been tracking and testing the changes on my Bot/Kin/Heat MM. A longer comment is in the main thread , but the main points are below: ------ + On Live, a player always flopped five times over Bonfire's 45 second duration. A critter was likely to flop ten times. + On Brainstorm yesterday, a player always flopped five times over Bonfire's 45 second duration. A critter was likely to flop four times. + On Brainstorm today, a player always flopped three times over Bonfire's 30 second duration. A critter was likely to flop six times. Yesterday I noticed many large spawns that didn't have a single flop before they all made it out of the bonfire. Today was better. Not quite as good as on live, but better. The smaller radius means that critters are rather more likely to make it out of the patch than they are on live; but providing you can keep them within the area of effect then the flop rate is good enough to make bonfire "viable" once again as a CC tool. The shorter duration is annoying however - 120s base recharge, 30s duration, and 3.07s cast time makes it practically impossible to run permanently any longer; even for a /kin with Perma-Hasten, triple-stacked Siphon Speed and a +33% recharge rate T4 Alpha Slot. I don't see anything in the patch notes about a reduced duration, so I'm hoping that's a bug...? Notably the ToHit check does indeed appear to only be kicking in for damage. The knockback/knockdown didn't appear to be missing; even vs players. My "hostile" target player in warburg noticed a lot of misses from the damage ticks; but they still got flopped on their rear the same number of times regardless of +defense toggles or insps. I also tested both Sudden Acceleration KB->KD and Overwhelming Force KB->KD individually and combined; as well as adding Ragnarok: Chance for KD. There did not appear to be any noticable difference in flop rate from the additional IOs (e.g. pick any one single KB->KD and don't bother adding a Ragnarok proc) However combining Bonfire with another ability like Whirlwind or Repel (with KB->KD procs in them) made the critter flop rate skyrocket. [EDIT: @TheDevs: I know part of the balance pass involves a penalty for "Hard Mez" (like Holds) of 3.0x cooldown and for "Soft Mez" (like Immobilises) of 2.0x cooldown. And Bonfire as a KD patch could nearly count as "Hard Mez". However 30s duration/120s recharge combined with the reduced 15ft radius feels a bit too drastic to me. Any chance of 30s duration/90s recharge or 40s duration/120s recharge instead; or bumping the radius back up to 25ft please? Personally I'd actually lean towards the latter - Bonfire's damage is honestly an afterthought for me; but there are people who have been leveraging it as a AoE damage patch... and at least if it keeps the original radius they could choose to slot it for +Accuracy and Damage Procs, at the expense of Recharge Rate and CC effectiveness. Alternatively, perhaps apply yesterday's lessened KD rate but allow multiple slotted KD IOs (Sudden Acceleration KB->KD, Overwhelming Force KD Proc, Ragnarok KD Proc) to combine and raise the rate so that 2-3 IOs = equal to Live?]

The line in blue is new. Earlier versions of the proposed beta patch had reduced the KB/KD rate substantially whenever Knockback-to-Knockdown IOs were slotted in bonfire. Apparently they've reverted part of that (increasing the rate again) in this revision of the patch; but added an accuracy check instead for the damage component (presumably the power is too good if it deals autohit damage *AND* autohit knockdown...) As it happens, I actually tested Bonfire's KD/KB rate on my Bot/Kin/Heat MM (has bonfire via his epic pool) only yesterday. Just before this revision of the patch became available. On LIVE, my MM's Bonfire with either a Sudden Acceleration or Overwhelming Force KB-to-KD IO in it will keep a group of foes in its radius flopping almost constantly. They often don't have time to fully stand up before they're bounced on their rear again, with the result that hardly any of them get attacks off. On Brainstorm yesterday, the same group of foes can stand up and run out of the radius and/or get at least two attacks off before they're bounced again. The change was so drastic that I immobilised a group and checked how often they flopped over the course of a Bonfire patch; then did the same against another player character in Warburg... I've just done another test on Brainstorm today. + On Live, a player always flopped five times over Bonfire's 45 second duration. A critter was likely to flop ten times. + On Brainstorm yesterday, a player always flopped five times over Bonfire's 45 second duration. A critter was likely to flop four times. + On Brainstorm today, a player always flopped three times over Bonfire's 30 second duration. A critter was likely to flop six times. Yesterday I noticed many large spawns that didn't have a single flop before they all made it out of the bonfire. Today was better. Not quite as good as on live, but better. The smaller radius means that critters are rather more likely to make it out of the patch than they are on live; but providing you can keep them within the area of effect then the flop rate is good enough to make bonfire "viable" once again as a CC tool. The shorter duration is annoying however - 120s base recharge, 30s duration, and 3.07s cast time makes it practically impossible to run permanently any longer; even for a /kin with Perma-Hasten, triple-stacked Siphon Speed and a +33% recharge rate T4 Alpha Slot. I don't see anything in the patch notes about a reduced duration, so I'm hoping that's a bug... Notably the ToHit check does indeed appear to only be kicking in for damage. The knockback/knockdown didn't appear to be missing; even vs players. My "hostile" target player in warburg noticed a lot of misses from the damage ticks; but they still got flopped on their rear the same number of times regardless of +defense toggles or insps. Oh, and I should point out that I tested both Sudden Acceleration KB->KD and Overwhelming Force KB->KD individually and combined; as well as adding Ragnarok: Chance for KD. There did not appear to be any noticable difference in flop rate from the additional IOs (e.g. pick any one single KB->KD and don't bother adding a Ragnarok proc) However combining Bonfire with another ability like Whirlwind or Repel (with KB->KD procs in them) made the critter flop rate skyrocket. Bonfire on LIVE Bonfire on BRAINSTORM YESTERDAY Bonfire on BRAINSTORM TODAY

The benefit of NOT baking the level 6 upgrade power into the henchmen is that you can opt to not use it on your AssBot. That ridiculously bad 'Flamethrower' attack is still a big drain on damage output. Agree Bots can be a bit tricky to fit all the uniques in, unless you're level 50 with bags of inf to spare and have got your Frankenslotting down 100%. They could have doubled the Protector Bot defence and made it unenhanceable; just as they could have fixed it to work with two components like Ember Shield. The current proposal on Beta still feels like a bit of a cludge fix to me.

This has gotten firmly into Granny Smith vs Tangerine territory. To recap; briefly: Earlier on in this thread, there was a conversation between FUBARczar and Erractic1 about the Sonic Blast primary. Erratic1 pointed out that Sonic has some decent attacks prior to the T9 Nuke; and was not in as "horrible a position" as FUBARczar claimed. FUBARczar then posted a screenshot of the chart produced by Galaxy Brain (as pointed out by Kachooman). Oedipus_Tex asked if that chart represented solo clear times, and I pointed out that it did... but "with SO enhancements only (no IOs, no procs, no incarnates, etc)." In that exercise by Galaxy Brain, the purpose of the chart (as-stated at the very top of the thread) is: "the premise of these tests are to isolate Ranged Primaries as much as possible to gauge their "realistic" base performance in a given mission environment." Note the specific goal there - it is not ranking a Sonic Blaster versus a Fire Blaster versus an Ice Blaster, it is ranking the Sonic Blast Primary versus the Fire Blast Primary versus the Ice Blast Primary. Secondary and Epic powers are purposely not used. I am 100% not contesting that a few of of the powers contained within the Fire Blast powerset are particularly brilliant in terms of DPA, and that therefore whenever you include the Secondary and Epic pools, those particular powers can contribute to an excellent attack chain and a better character. The chart used a particular mission; but things such as player ability and playstyle and enemy type and mob positioning are all going to factor in there. We could look at Fire Blast's attacks versus other sets's attacks (both fully procced) to show the difference in raw additional damage from IOs that each can theoretically gain (e.g. the below for Ice Blast; only looking at primary attacks in isolation and assumes recharge % slotting in the actual attacks = 0. It doesn't factor in "attack chains", but the recharge times at various global recharge rates give some indication of uptime/availability). Or we could model the likes of Water, Rad, Dark, etc. since all have multiple AoE attacks which can take multiple useful procs (Rad can even become a better -res debuffer than Sonic: Irradiate by itself can take both Achilles' Heel and Fury of the Gladiator)... but endless screenshots of spreadsheets don't actually answer the question of "Is my blaster going to deal more damage if I take the Fire Blast Primary?" The answer to that question is obviously going to be "yes" the vast majority of the time. But attempting to model the difference in actual total performance between SmokeyMcFirePants and SuperScreechySonic-san is a whole other ball game. I have indeed played Blasters and Defenders rather extensively over the years on live (and a few on HC too, although my playtime is extremely restricted these days compared to a decade ago; so I usually prefer to roll any new builds up on my private i24 box). My two favourite Blasters on live were a Sonic/Elec/Ice Blapper and a Fire/Ice/Fire engine of destruction; and I played a Sonic Defender a lot as well. All of which were IO'ed up the wazoo. I'm aware of the differences in performances and playstyles between actual characters. And that that is a much different conversation than "Primary A is x% better than Primary B with SOs and y% better with IOs". It's considerably trickier to objectively rank two completely different builds let alone opinions about which feels more powerful or which you enjoy more. We could spend umpteen more pages trying to pin down acceptable baseline character builds and then work out the best slotting possible for several different attack chains per character; but a Fire Blaster is always going to be top tier at damage output - I'm not debating that in the slightest. So with all that in mind, I'm not sure it's going to be all that helpful to continue this particular tangent any further. --------- However... the conversation about DPA might be worth continuing? There are a few powers within the Fire Blast set which are total outliers: Fireball, Blaze, Blazing Bolt, possibly Inferno (its base damage is excellent, but its a bit of a playstyle question whether PBAoE > TAoE). Individually each of those have a few "peers" across the other powersets... Fireball: Other sets have things like Ball Lightning and Irradiate; and some ranged hoverblaster setups might find cones nearly as easy to position... but by and large this deserves its reputation. Long Range, Low Arcanatime, Wide Radius, Easy to position. Blazing Bolt: a top-tier snipe; although other powerset snipes can trump it one-on-one due to additional damage proc opportunities (Moonbeam, for example). Blaze: Base DPA is ridiculously high. A few other powers can contend with it (Freeze Ray and Bitter Ice Blast spring to mind) but those exist in a set that doesn't have Fireball. ...but much of the ranking of the Fire Blast powerset comes from the fact that it contains all of them simultaneously. Since DarknessEternal brought up the notion of "nerfing" Fire Blast earlier... would it be more acceptable to rebalance such powers by increasing their animation time (like they did on Energy Transfer back in the day) or to lower their damage output? [My preferred solution would still be to establish some kind of balanced relationship between Animation Time and Damage across all powersets; but that would obviously be a major undertaking!]

I'm very tempted to respond here with several pages worth of PPM math and a link to a spreadsheet. Instead, I'll merely point out that +recharge is NOT the be-all-and-end-all of IO slotting; and that my argument earlier was not that other Blaster powersets > Fire; but that their performance isn't as far ahead of the rest of the pack in the actual game as they are in FUBARczar's chart screenshot. My reasoning for this is: (i) Compared to some other powersets, Fire Blast gains a lower damage multiplication effect from heavy investment into IOs (e.g. its attacks cannot take the same sheer amount of multiple damage procs compared to Ice or Dark) and to a lesser extent from Incarnates (For example: their optimal attack chain Blaze->BlazingBolt->Fireball wants +400% recharge. Taking Spiritual or Agility Alpha rather than Musculature Alpha will go a large way to getting there; at the cost of raw +damage). (ii) Fire's DoTs are difficult to leverage on teams because often things end up dying before the DoT ends. (This is a similar effect to "overkilling" or "corpse blasting", but it's much more difficult to compensate for/work around). Only in a vacuum. For example: @oedipus_tex pointed out earlier that Sonics -res debuff is substantially higher on the Defender AT than on Blasters. If we're talking solo raw damage over time against a target that you can't kill in less than a few seconds, then naturally Fire Blast will have an advantage. It's the no-nonsense DPS powerset. But it's not the most team friendly powerset; and its ST attacks take only one damage proc outside of uniques: Gladiator's Javelin. Assuming this post isn't lacking its [sarcasm] tags, I'm not railing against Fire Blasters - I played one on Live for years. Their damage output and power selection is actually pretty well balanced compared to the others. What isn't well balanced (and has NEVER been) is animation time. If the HC team did a balance pass over the various ranged powersets to address animation time...? (Even if it was not to actually adjust the lengths, but to make them interruptable by a subsequent power activation after a certain duration; like what happens with redraw!) Well, I could definitely get behind that.

Yep. As far as I know it applies to everything except for +recharge%. So... if you have a Musculature Alpha, then that should buff the damage of your Lore and Judgement powers, etc. I'll admit I've not tested all of them, but it's rather easy to see the effect in the combat stats window for things like "Barrier". Edit: Yep, quick check shows the Judgement Ability is showing a very sizable difference in damage numbers with/without Musculature Alpha slotted.

As far as I'm aware Alpha Slot buffs have always buffed the other Incarnate Abilities (except for +recharge, which if I rmeember correctly was specifically disallowed by the devs since it'd make things like Lore and Judgement and Destiny too powerful to be up more regularly)

Depends on the Barrier tier. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Destiny_Slot_Abilities#Barrier The Core Epiphany is the one that can be "perma" as recharges in 120s and has a (small) component of its buff that lasts for all 120s. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=incarnate.destiny.barrier_core_epiphany + Grants 5% Defence for 120s + Grants 2.5% Defence for 60s (so 7.5% total) + Grants 25% Defence for 30s (so 32.5% total) + Grants 57.5% Defence for 10s (so 90% total) It also gets affected by any Alpha Slot buffs, so you can multiply those +defence values by 1.2 if you're running an Agility or Nerve Alpha. (It has identical values for +resistance% as well; but the +defence% is obviously the one we're talking about for softcapping!)

That used to be the case, but thankfully not anymore. I'm regularly seeing 2-3 green numbers over my head every 10 seconds now.

No worries, I'm exactly the same myself pre-caffeine! 😁

They're currently perma-softcapped whenever i'm running Barrier. +4.42% from Maneuvers +5.00% from the Edict of the Master +Def Unique +12.80% from the first Protector Bot Bubble +12.80% from the second Protector Bot Bubble +6.00% from Barrier Core Epiphany (+5% regular with an extra 20% added to it from the Agility Alpha Slot is +6% total) +5.00% from the Call to Arms Unique Subtotal = 46.02% Defence (as per the second screenshot) But (unfortunately) they will stop being softcapped if the proposed changes go live. +4.42% from Maneuvers +5.00% from the Edict of the Master +Def Unique +22.19% from a single Protector Bot Bubble (12.8/7.5*13) +6.00% from Barrier Core Epiphany +5.00% from the Call to Arms Unique Subtotal = 42.61% Defence. The totals in each of the positional defence categories in my screenshots are correct. The defence from the Call To Arms unique is already getting added at the very bottom of each of the positional defence categories. It's just that it is being lumped within a subheading named "Base Defence" instead of being listed individually. It's only a few percent, but the difference between softcap vs nearly-softcap is pretty major. Hence my suggestion that if this is intended as a quality of life change... then surely it would be better to just change the defensive numbers for the Protector Bots; rather than the MM or the other henchmen. And as far as I'm aware (from my own experience tweak my i24 test server) the most straightforward change would just require duplicating the Force Shield power and flagging one of the copies as [AoE/only affects robotic henchmen/stacks from different sources]; and the other as [ST/only affects owner/never stacks from any source]. That'd mean the Protector Bots would just need to throw up a single bubble each once every four minutes as an AoE (2x 7.5% base, affects all henchmen) plus one of them throwing another on their owner (1x 7.5% base, affects the player). The stat magnitudes would't need touched, so it'd solve the start-of-mission-setup delay and Protector Bot +Defence issues without affecting anything else.

The best (worst?) I've personally experienced was a Laserjet Printer. One of the old indestructible cube-shaped HP Monstrosities (I want to say "4200n"?) Technically it wasn't directly aimed at me, but I still had to dodge it. And so did the temp agency guy who was just arriving to the IT office on their 1st day of work as it hurtled past the doorway just a few inches from their face (not exaggerating/joking even a little bit!) That wasn't the first time our IT Manager had a bad phonecall with a particular Board Member and it wouldn't be the last; but we did make a point afterwards of keeping the pile of old decommisioned equipment further away from his side of the room... (These days I'm CyberSecurity... so I regularly get to scare/annoy the bejeepers out of board members. Turnabout is fair play indeed!)

Any forum means lots of people, lots of preconceived notions, lots of different ways of thinking; and lots of different automatic responses to things. But CoH also has a MASSIVE gulf in "experience" and "conventional wisdom" between the folks that have been around since beta and those that've just turned up post-shutdown... even leaving aside how active you were on the old message boards. If I see someone with questions or the wrong idea about things then I'll usually try to type up something if I have a few minutes to spare. Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes another person even adds something else that's worth me paying heed to. Often it's not even about having the discussion with the OP as much as leaving a bit of helpful advice for the next person who has a similar query and comes across the thread in a forum search. I've been accused of many things on various forums over the years, occasionally including patience/helpfulness. But I currently have a 12 month old and honestly I've noticed that there are a lot of "transferable skills" involved. There exists another human being who doesn't think the same way you do, who desperately wants something, and who is having trouble communicating clearly. Your end goal is obviously learning and enlightenment and happy coexistence... but first you'd better be prepared to deal with incoherent arguments, unintelligible screaming, tantrums, being totally ignored and/or getting half-eaten chunks of banana thrown at you. Although I used to work in tech support, so I've had much worse things thrown at me over the years. (Unfortunately I was born in the very early '80s so I can't claim either millennialship or boomerdom. My memories of the year 2000 are also rather hazy. I vaguely remember there being rather a lot of fireworks and alcohol, but not quite as many computers exploding as people had expected...)

That's not a bad power selection, but the slotting has considerable room for improvement. As-is it's missing ED-capped damage in Storm Kick (I suspect that whoever built it made the mistake of leaving Assault Core Embodiment toggled on in Mids - it incorrectly adds +DamageEnhancement rather than +DamageBuff) and using -resistance procs in Crippling Axe Kick and Dragon's Tail (rather than the FF, which only has a 33% chance of activation and only shaves 1.27s off when it procs; so probably isn't adding much to your attack chain). Focus Chi is also technically underslotted - it can take 70.84% recharge enhancement without the Build Up Proc's activation chance being negatively impacted. The sets in the various +Defensive Powers and Tough are a bit all over the place - the 5-piece LOTGs should be altered to leave out Defence/Recharge instead of Endurance/Recharge, and the IO slotting configuration with the most Endurance Reduction in it should go in Maneuvers. Accuracy is way overcapped - all the attacks are well over the 95% Hit Rate cap versus +4s (let alone the regular +3s you see at endgame) even without Tactics or the Kismet. A 6-piece Numina set in Health is also a bit ridiculous considering the state of +regen in the current game and the shortcomings of the rest of the build; it'd be much better served splitting that up and using more procs in Physical Perfection and Stamina and adding a 6th Mako's Bite in Storm Kick to keep Ranged Defence the same. Without swapping out any powers or moving too much around, it could look something like this (same Defences/Resistances if not a smidge higher; same global recharge rate. Lower +Regen but more +Healing Procs so overall health return works out higher. Bucketloads more Endurance Recovery and significantly higher damage output!) All that said; I still prefer the first build - this one won't be able to softcap its defences on Incarnate content (needs 58.75% defence to Softcap) even with Barrier running; and even regular taskforces on the new difficulty settings will require some extra (softcap will be anywhere from 45% to 75% plus another +13.75% versus AVs).