Sniktch

That would be my reference point for Energy Aura being over the top. Not Titan Weapon level over-the-top, but the original devs overbuffed it, and not because of Energize. So thanks, @XaoGarrent, for proving my dad's old saw about assume and alerting me to your overall quality as a poster.

A better way to view it: Some of the old sets have issues. Stone Armor, Dark Armor, and Regen most notably; they need to be improved some. Some of the new sets have issues. Bio, Rad, and Energy Aura are the most immediate to mind. They need to be reined in some. Just like all the other balance discussions, you can't "just buff never nerf". Nor can you "just nerf never buff". Both paths lead to a game's self-destruction. Outliers at the top need to be brought down, and underperformers need to be brought up.

The error in your logic is trying to use Titan Weapons as a balance point, instead of a drastic outlier. To reverse your logic, what business does Super Strength have being so 'strong' when Energy Melee exists? Answer: Energy Melee is a drastic outlier, and should not be used as a balance comparison until it's brought up to a reasonable level. Similarly, Titan is a drastic outlier, and should not be used as a balance comparison until it's brought down to a reasonable level.

Yeah, any NPC like that you see is a tribute to someone who won't be joining us in any other way. 😢

I'll defer to your experience with Claws - I still recall your demo after the first animation pass on Claws when you managed to nearly solo a pylon on an SO build. And it's likely my experience with Claws almost entirely on Stalkers who have neither Follow-Up nor Spin to leverage in mobs influences my perception.

Predictions: Claws will see little overall benefit from adding Hasten and shifting up to IOs; the set's base numbers are so low that further decreases to them won't change much. Stackable Follow-Up will matter, but not enough to move the needle any great distance. Kinetic will improve, but not enough. Turning the cone into a KD will help but the set's biggest bottleneck is the slow animations for the bigger hits and the unreliable effect of Concentrated Strike, neither of which is fixable by slotting or setting. Dark will stay about where it is. Titan will explode with just the addition of Hasten; IOs on top will leave the rest in the dust. Spines might be able to keep the taillights in sight, but just barely. Staff has a bottleneck RE animation times on AoEs, and so will not keep pace. Psy will remain feast-or-famine based on Insight rolls. Rad will fall off due to Atom Smasher's animation time being the biggest throttle.

You can instead put Celerity or Unbounded Leap: Stealth in Shinobi-Iri itself, or at least you could last time I checked. That lets you have full Stealth without needing Sprint on, if you have a slot to spare.

While I don't disagree with your post, I will point out you're basing off not just sets but ATO sets and procs. Think the set out with SOs, as that's the baseline balance point, and the problems I point out become a LOT more pertinent.

Stalkers have some issues with Dual Blades - specifically, the combos are really badly paced out, with half of them being tied to Build Up -> AS and thus only available on average every minute or so, those two combos being the only ones usable till Vengeful Slice is accessible, and Placate, AS, and Build-Up being combo pieces makes any of them used mid-other-combo break that combo - can't hit BU just before a Vengeful Slice triggers an Attack Vitals, can't Placate to set up a guaranteed crit, can't just jump on AS when it's got a ring-crit showing, because they all break other combos. The other ATs don't have this issue because A: their aggro-control power - Taunt or Warrior's Challenge - isn't mixed into the combo pool and thus can't break other combos; this also means they get one more combo earlier, and B: because Blinding Feint and/or Empower lasts long enough for them to run a full combo during their both-on duration; while Empower for Stalkers lasts the same amount of time, unlike the other ATs, by the time you GET Empower, Build Up is done. This is why the usual advice given to Stalkers for Dual Blades is 'ignore combos, just do the highest DPA attacks'. My view is any set with a gimmick, if the best advice is 'ignore the gimmick', there's an issue that needs addressed.

I can assure you it does indeed work exactly like I said - I did it on Live with more than one Soldier Of Arachnos/Widow. Didn't do it on any other AT because side-switching on Live was a multi-week process due to a max Tips per day and no Null, but it was dev-confirmed it worked for everyone if you did it.

The base Icon/Facemakers lack one thing that is only available in Pocket D or actual tailors - size scalar and gender changing. Thus, 'just use the base ones' isn't a solid answer, as there are situations where it's flatly impossible to use them for that purpose. Personal preference would be for allowing us to place the 'full service' versions in bases, but there may be hitches in that that aren't immediately apparent, Cities code being Cities code.

Cross Punch is a good power, with some quirks and caveats. The caveats: 1. It's ONLY a good power if you take both Kick and Boxing, neither of which is good even with the synergy benefits they gain. 2. It's a pool power, so a bit more END-intensive than if not. 3. If cued up and chasing a runner, it won't fire as soon as other powers will, even other cones - you can usually get beside or even past them before it'll properly detect and trigger. 4. It's a melee cone, and as a pool power cannot take ATOs, so your choices are limited on slotting; further, as a power with innate KD, using a Winter set risks double-proc firing enemies away from you. This can be good or bad, depending on playstyle and Knock tolerance. My assumption is most folks who are going high-end stuff will slot in either the purple or PvP set; the latter for the -Res proc. Now, the quirks: 1. You need to take Boxing and Kick both....but it doesn't care WHEN they're taken in relation to Cross Punch, or even if they're available to you at the time of use. One of course has to be taken early to unlock the higher tiers of the Fighting pool, but the other can be taken at 49 without worry via respec or if you don't mind Cross Punch being weaker on the way up. 2. The +toHit and +Recharge are +5%/+10% per target hit per synergy power owned - if you can smack 5 targets at once, that's 6 seconds of +50% Tohit and +100% Recharge, or 25%/50% if you only have one prereq. This is not slottable for, nor can To Hit sets be used. It also does not show up in your under-life-bar buff display, but you can observe it if you monitor recharge and ToHit. I'm unsure if it's stackable or not, but given the very short duration of the buff, I doubt it would matter even if it was. 3. You CAN slot stun sets as well as Knock sets, though the procs are fairly weak by comparison; this does give the option of double-stacking Knock procs for an inconsistent melee catapult 😛 4. The damage buff is not a 'damage buff' per se - it is an increase in the BASE damage of the power, which is one of the reasons it doesn't show up properly ingame or in-Mids. This means damage enhancements boost it, which is why this power easily competes with most T3 melee powers, and beats some higher-tier ones such as the aforementioned Dragon's Tail.

Actually, you can have 13. 6 base, 3 heroside tailor mishes, 3 villside tailor mishes, 1 Halloween salvage. Or 14 for SoA with their extra mish. However, slots 11 and up CANNOT be edited at all, because they do not show up in the big window. They're a straight clone of Slot 0 at the time of acquisition.

Somewhere between man-years and man-decades of code labor.

Understandable, but as has been noted in other topics, trying to cram in more slots outside of GM commands tends to do.....bad things. Not just to the character, to the server. Believe me, I'd like more slots - but mechanically it's unstable and from a balance point, I think it'd be unwise no matter how much we'd like it.

As a side note, in a mixed team you can effectively run all content via Ouro; the team lead's alignment is what sets what's available at the moment. So a Rogue and a Vigilante can swap Ouro arcs back-and-forth quite easily. There are some exceptions - Mender Silos' arc cannot be done by people with a different 'base' alignment than the team lead, because he actually has two arcs and 'base' alignment triggers which one you get, and the Rogue, Hero, Vigilante, and Villain-specific arcs obviously can't be run by any but those alignments.

The AH access is a single function call - you get all of it or none of it.

Pax: this is already possible with a respec; slotting during a respec is not done by-level, but all at once, without restrictions on which ones can be put where.

A good contrast between RL and cinematic strength - he's got minimal definition showing. He's not 'cut', 'ripped', 'sculpted' - he's STRONG, not show.

They are buyable from the AH for an Inf cost(IIRC under Fixed Price menu), a P2W vendor for a Merit cost, and rarely drop as recipes from kills. Can also be coughed out by a Super Pack. Also, if you haven't done any of the Respec Trials, you can get one per from them - not sure if side-uniqueness is a thing for them, but if it isn't that's another 6 you can get, if it is it's another 3.

Incorrect - Jim Butcher did in fact get permission to play Harry Dresden on Cities during the live era - I know, I teamed with him.

Classic STF vs. Miss Liberty is just the contact, yes - the difference between Classic LRSF and current LRSF is classic has States and Psyche instead of nobody and Penny, thus is much, MUCH harder.

That would require even more work. Something I think people need to recognize: At this point, the only method the devs have to 'increase difficulty' efficiently is to nerf current powers. The only new piece of content made during the Dark Years was Market Crash, which is not even close to a difficult piece of content, and is made entirely of repurposed assets. It has no Incarnate shifts or altered mechanics; the differences are entirely cosmetic - welding a Sky Raider jetpack onto Freakshow models and upscaling and recoloring a Jump Bot. The Crimson prototype's ability to kill Phantom Armies is purely because it has Untyped damage on some attacks. There are at current exactly TWO people that I am aware of working on the game code - Leandro and Captain Powerhouse. If there are others, it's still a tiny team at best. Making any major changes to how anything globally worked took an over-50-member team MONTHS on Live. Asking for more content that's specifically harder, or sweeping mechanical changes that make things globally harder is asking for man-YEARS of development time to be used making new assets, new code, dealing with childish whining by forumites, testing, debugging, dealing with childish whining by forumites, retesting, redebugging, dealing with childish whining by forumites, and finally saying 'still broke, good enough, ship it'. By comparison, altering a single table entry in a negative direction might take an afternoon; they'll still have to deal with the childish whining, but it won't stop everything else during the interim.

Problem: There are no Level 55 entities in the code. At all. 54? Yup. 54 with levelshifts? Specific entities in certain Incarnate trials, and nothing else. A "+5" option would either require the team to code out level 55 versions of EVERY ENEMY that can be level 50, or adapt the levelshift code to be used by the Notoriety system; it's very likely this would have to be built out of whole-cloth and hackjobbed in, since levelshift is, as noted, ONLY used on specific entities in Incarnate trials - AKA 'placed by hand'.

I'm not asking for 'a start'. I'm asking what SINGLE POWER can each of those other pools have that could even possibly be comparable to Hasten, without shattering what little risk/reward balance is left? What single aspect of the character would it affect? How big? How frequently? How much END cost? If you wouldn't trade Hasten for a no-interrupt Aid Self AND NOTHING ELSE, even if it was a one-dip, then it's not 'big enough' to match yet. How fast would it have to animate, how much would its base heal have to be, how much END would you consider 'low enough'? And if it gets 'good enough' to be a fair trade for Hasten, how badly does that fuck over primary or secondary click self-heals?