Sniktch

As a clarifying example: Go into Options. Look for Beta Options; there's one there that displays power recharge time remaining as a timer as well as the growing icons. That took a couple of months to build and blew up the beta server at least once I'm aware of. Just to display a countdown on top of the power icons.

Monster Hunter: World - a bit grindy at places, and the story can be cringe-inducing if you can't manage to see it as intentionally ridiculous self-parody, but it's a great way to smash a firebreathing dinosaur's head in with a big damn hammer when I'm not doing similar to folks in the Isles or Paragon. Decently pretty, and the difficulty is just about right; hard enough to kick your teeth in if you get cocky and play stupid, easy enough that if you don't get cocky and play stupid, you don't need to be a cyber-wired ninja spider to play 'effectively'. I also dabble in 'pixel paleontology' - NES, SNES, Genesis, the occasional throwback to the Amiga or C64, when Electronic Arts actually didn't suck like a two-dollar hooker working a black hole.

My opinion is: Anything PvPers want that isn't designed to bait/crowbar people into PvP, they can have - as soon as Marshall and Born In Battle don't need villains to flag for PvP to get, whether by changing the requisite badges to not include PvP-zone Explore and History ones, or moving the plaques/badges out of PvP zones. And yes, Mac, I do know the history, etc - but the point, however annoying it is, bears repeating lest human nature rear its ugly head in the form of "it'll be different THIS time!". Nukes, Shivans, and the original BiB/Marshall requirements were the definition of crowbarring folks into the zones, and I'm sure you remember just how nasty that turned for everyone involved. As much as I honestly hate PvP, I don't begrudge you your 'fun' - I just want to be able to forget it exists regardless of where my characters live.

It's a lovely dream - but I'll point out that TFs used the 'locked team at start' setup from launch to this very day. As far as I'm aware, Ouro uses the exact same set of code, so poking it could very well be...bad. Things that were baked-in for Issue 0 have historically been radioactive kludgefucks at best, and quite often tickling them results in reams of "how the screaming hell did that happen?!" situations. Then again, the Mayhem/Safeguard re-do contacts do something similar if different - you get exemped/Mal'ed, but only when you actually enter the mission, so maybe Homecoming has figured out the magic bullet.

And even console games have bugs, flubs, catastrophic fuckups or worse. Good example: Final Fantasy series. In something like half the games (including the beloved 7) Darkness status, for one reason or another, does exactly nothing. In 6, Darkness worked - except that physical Evade percentages didn't work, defaulting to magic Evade instead, so Darkness did nothing. All kinds of glitch tricks on old cartridge games, too. Coding/programming have always been dodgy endeavors - look at Buggerfall....I mean Daggerfall, or most any other Bethesda game. If that's 'normal', and Cities is legendarily "my god, WHY DID THEY DO IT THAT WAY???"-inducing, it's just another thing to love 😄

A lot of AI interactions are less polished now than they were on Live, actually - a running boss will start their sprint usually before you get within visual range, for example. I think it may be an unintended consequence of some of the changes 'under the hood' that were made during the Dark Years, possibly related to making Ally-type NPCs able to follow through most stealth powers or maybe to some of the other tweaks they did.

He means not just for the arc, but as a universal effect - lock yourself to level 19 and do all the arcs at that range, without locking yourself into one arc at a time for example.

To point out a simple reversal: Those who say the difficulty is too low are told to do various intentional self-gimping things, usually facetiously and snarkily. TOs only, for example. To that, I say: if that's a valid suggestion, so is suggesting that everyone who wants 'easy' should just kick it down to -1. +4/x8 is supposed to be a challenge. -1/x anything is supposed to be easy mode. Unfortunately, currently +4/x8 is steamroll-easy - as a note, I have multiple characters who do indeed do Rularuu, Nemmy, Malta, Carnies, and DA at +2/x8 and CAN do it at +4, but I don't because it's not 'challenging', it's just slower. IO bonuses, active Incarnate abilities, and Hasten (which, BTW, is the single biggest +Recharge effect in the game - even Speed Boost and Siphon Speed are weaker, and they either are not-affect-self or require regular reapplication with a hit-check on a hostile) all make survivability via the soft-cap too easy to reach, and relegate early powers to the set-mule trash-heap. And as a comparison point, I remember Repeat Offenders and all the sub-groups they had - to me, THAT kind of power isn't 'bad' because everyone actually contributes, no player is an island, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. As so many others have said, it falls foul when one person is basically doing the mission and everyone else is just there for pity slots. In a way, we've full-circled back to launch tanker-herding, just without the tanker and with an aggro cap.

The 'random set mission' can be cleared off by selecting another dialog option; I had no issues getting the big list to pop back up with 1-2 clicks. Aside that, your suggestions/complaints are wholly valid; as a fun fact, in the Mortimer Kal SF, Infernal counts, Numina doesn't if you soul-trap her, and none of the Midnighters do. Most alignment missions also feature Villain-flagged targets instead of Hero-flagged targets. Yes, it's possible to get, it's just a lot less 'falls in your lap' than blueside. Par for the course, considering both +max END Accolades for redside are still predicate on giving PvP permission, whereas none of the blueside ones are.

It is.

The Widows and Soldiers took an astounding amount of hackwork and kudgefuckery to get working, both as regards their powersets and regards their costumes. The Crab Backpack is part of that kludgefuckery. Poking at any part of that Jenga tower is asking for a collapse. The least-risky option would be different-looking packs for folks not actually RPing a Crab; if that's what you're interested in, then I'm sure the Homecoming team would be more than happy to include your model/mesh/texture/rigging once you actually make it. Also, lorewise? The backpack is a SPINAL GRAFT. Remove backpack = remove most of your spinal column. Congrats, you are now Professor Xavier minus the telepathy! Except it's also wired directly into your central nervous system, so there's a lobotomy involved too.

That's effectively what Cross Punch, Boxing, and Kick do now - there's four versions of Boxing and Kick, and two versions of Cross Punch(only two because you MUST take Boxing or Kick to get to Cross Punch, without exception). Which one the game calls is determined by which powers you have - Boxing calls Boxing A, Boxing + Kick calls Boxing B, Boxing + Cross Punch calls Boxing C, Boxing +kick +Cross Punch calls Boxing D. This is also why Cross Punch's damage doesn't show properly on the ingame numbers - same as with Titan, because the ingame numbers display wasn't set up to handle the variable calls used. So to do this, you'd need to make 3 more versions of each pet power, rebuild the mastermind pet entries by removing the upgraded minions from the base power and slapping them into new tables that will (hopefully) answer the relevant calls, recode the upgrade powers to autos with no slots since they couldn't be slotted for anything, repurpose the Fighting Pool synergy code, build the code hooks to call the appropriate table when a summon is used, cram it all into the codebase and hit Pineapple or whatever it's named at that point, reciting the mantra the Live devs did every new push: "Please God don't let it break everything again". You'd also probably need to rebalance Masterminds whole-cloth, as the time and END spent resummoning and rebuffing is meant to be a limiter on their max output in hard-target (AV/GM/EB) situations.

A further note on the EA chatter: Realize all my numbers upthread are Scrapper vs. Scrapper, because that's one of the two ATs that has SR, Nin, and EA. Brutes and tanks don't get Nin, tanks don't get EA. And I picked Scrapper...because that's where the performance between the three sets is closest. Stalker, EA blows Nin and SR away easily.

The problem with Boxing and Kick is the same problem Jab in Super Strength has - they're actually pretty close to on-formula balance regarding damage/recharge/endurance cost, but because their base recharge is so low, they do very poor damage per use. Jab or Boxing fired three times is the same damage and END cost as Heavy Mallet in Stone Melee, it just takes longer to animate and 'feels' weaker. Standard 8 DPE, really bad DPA/DPS. Up their recharge to 6 or 8 seconds with the equivalent increase in damage, and even with the pool attack end-cost penalty, they'd be mostly acceptable attacks. As a comparison point, Air Superiority is considered one of if not the best pool attacks, and its numbers are pretty much identical to Super Strength Punch or Stone Stone Fists - ~1 END per use more, always does Knockup, always does -Fly versus chance to Knockdown and can slot ATOs. The -Fly can be considered a bit of a 'freebie', but in all other respects they're all almost perfectly on the Damage/Recharge/End formula, and none is 'bad' unless your benchmark is Titan. So yeah - up Boxing and Kick's recharge/END/damage, and people will stop complaining about them as logic prevails who am I kidding, they'll still bitch anyway.

...*chuckle* and that's why I say 90% eidetic, not 100% - knew Conserve got juggled, Drain was an issue, things got changed at APP prolif, and brain twisted three ropes into one knot. Appreciate the correction.