Coyotedancer

Having been on a team with one of them not so long ago... Solar isn't making that bit up. There are some really KB-happy chaos-monkeys out there, and they've pretty much ruined it for those of you who AREN'T intentional jerks. You say "Yay! Knockback!" and those of us who have had the misfortune of playing with one or more of those guys may well reply by hitting the Quit Team button. (In my case it was a Peacebringer player who thought it was just epic LOLs to intentionally troll the herding Tank, the Fire Dom with the Bonfire and my Time Defender with the Distortion Field by waiting until AFTER we had everything nicely gathered and the patches laid down to blast the whole mob of goons to the four winds. He thought it was just hilarious. When I recommended the "hover blast" approach instead, I got the "OMG how dare you tell me how to play my character!"-thing from both him and his buddy. So I did, in fact, wish them well and drop the team. 'No sense wasting time playing with them.) I'd say posting in LFG as specifically LOOKING for a Pinball Wizard or "Bounce team" is your best bet. 'Get all the KB-Fiends together and have a field day. You can be chaotic to your heart's content if everyone knows what they're getting into.

Wouldn't static be more Sweater Girl's thing?

Rei has made several dolls for me... These three are Grey Kestrel, the Nemissary and Palrah, who were favorite characters of mine back on Live. I don't have a good picture of him, but she also made Cardinal for me... Kestrel's Mu Adept companion.

While badges are *ALSO* Love, some of us do care quite a bit about our character's costumes and their bios. Me? I was every bit as proud of the Unquiet Bride's costumes or Nemissary's biography as I was of Kestrel's ludicrous build or Palrah's badge collection. Getting those details "just right" can take quite a bit of time and work, too, after all... It's nice when the effort is noticed. I'll always mention it when I come across a great look or a fun bio or a character name or concept that makes me grin. That kind of thing deserves recognition in my opinion, just like great game-play and being exceptionally good company.

I once-upon-a-time went through and did every single Ouro arc... on both sides... with my own favorite soloist. Her name was Grey Kestrel, and she was a Dual Blade/Willpower/Mu Mastery "recharge monster" Stalker with a perma-summoned Adept companion. I'm not sure if the number-crunchers and serious power-gamers would have considered Kestrel the "optimal" soloing choice or not, exactly, given DB's much-resisted Lethal damage type and a Stalker in general's lack of AoE (even with a blasty companion like Cardinal in the mix for the higher level content-), but she was the one who felt most capable of it to me. Very little in the game ever gave her serious trouble.

To get Base Raids back the devs would have to scrap basically every item-placement change that's been made post-Live. No more "any item in any room". No more "putting items in hallways and doorways". No more "clipping items through walls". No more "building above the plot".... and almost certainly no more completely unattached rooms or in-base teleporters. All of those things break the pathing and placement restrictions that base raids imposed on builders. Personally, given the way so many of us build these days? I'd give the removal of those options in the name of a niche feature that few PvPers even seem to want a very, VERY hard "no". It's just a guess, granted... but I suspect the number of base builders who love those improvements and would argue to defend them pretty substantially outnumbers the group who want to Base Raid, too.

"Folded like a taco..." Okay, I laughed out loud at that description. I swear I did. Been there. Done that. XD

I may have grabbed Gentleman Spectre for Dorian Stanton. It just fits him way too well. XD

Point Du Hoc... The fort where the ship raid groups typically gather.

I'm actually going to be... well, not snarky exactly, but a little cheeky let's say... and seriously suggest the combo on a Stalker. KM Stalkers can be monsters, but for some reason they just never seem to get much attention at all when the set comes up for discussion like this. It usually seems to become 'All About The Broots', and then everyone forgets that sneaky-sneak burst-damage types even exist. Granted, I'm biased about them... but I think KM Stalkers rarely get the attention they deserve. The character that's arguably my "main" here on Homecoming is a KM/Bio Stalker. My "unicorn" character? KM/FA. (If you PUG on Everlasting, you may have met them. Kaikara and her blue-side White Thorn "alter ego" are the former, while the Red Traveller is the later.) The very first Praetorian I ever made back on Live, when "gold side" was brand new, was KM/WP... Soloing her through those early, pre-"rebalance" days was actually FUN, and really won me over to the combination. Shade went on to become one of my favorite go-to TF and iTrial characters... So, yes. Biased about them, but it does come from experience. (And for the record, I've also had a KM/WP scrap, a Bio/KM brute and a WP/KM tank for comparison. Yes. I'm also a serious WP fan-girl. XD) That said, what advantages do the Stalkers have? The Stalker version of KM gets a regular build-up, which is really the big one for me. I've found I actually do prefer that over the somewhat gimmicky "wind-up" replacement the Tanks, Scraps and Brutes got. Also, Burst right out of Hide crits for some good AoE smashiness. (Throw the Stalker ATO Hide proc into the mix for added silliness. BU->AS->*proc*->Hide->Burst->Placate->And-We're-Off-To-The-Races as an opener is *great* fun. And painful for whoever's poor life choices put them in your Stalker's path...) Over-all, with its combination of damage types, KM ends up hitting like a load of bricks on pretty much anybody, so you can't go too far wrong whichever one you pick... But I do think that it really shines on a burst-damage AT.

Anchor it on the grate closest to the bowl. Everything that spawns near it will aggro to you. XD

Unless I'm in food-induced hibernation, I can bring Amtes, my Demons/Time.

That's been happening for awhile... The Assassin's attack will go off as usual, you'll be taken out of hide, the target will react as if hit but no damage will be applied to it. I haven't been able to figure to how to replicate the issue, though. It really does seem random.

*Nods* Yep. "Green Machine" (all-Empath) teams are terrifying, too. 'Most hilariously-silly-yet-scary team I ever saw in action? Back on Liberty, post-IOs but long. long before Incarnates or side-switching became Things, I watched FlyingCodeMonkey (That's Mr. Coyote), on Projector, join seven other Storm Controllers to take on... And complete!... Statesman's task force. Which, at the time, was pretty much considered the toughest content in the game.

I don't know, Solar... We seem to have had very different experiences with that. I've been spending most of my play-time recently running a Time/Dark Defender on Everlasting. I haven't had any trouble at all finding teams (PUGs or otherwise-) with her. She's been welcomed in all of them I've joined... Even the one with the peacebringer who kept blasting groups out of my Distortion Field and the fire Dom's Bonfire, and then wondering why we were both facepalming. XD I'm just not seeing this "support characters left in the dirt"-thing... We may not be absolutely NECESSARY to success these days, but we're still force multipliers and other players typically are smart enough to recognize that in my experience.

What VT said. XD It's just a mess any way you look at it, and very early-on I think everyone sort-of collectively shrugged and said, "Yeah. It's too tangled to make any real sense of, so do your own take." 'Not a great answer for people who really like to dot the I's and cross the T's on every detail of a codified world with well-understood assumptions, but it's about all we can do under the circumstances.

This. Back in the day, I did an "Ouro Project" with Grey Kestrel, my favorite Rogue DB/WP Stalker... Every entry on the Ouro arc list red-side. Then I moved her to Vigilante, and did the same thing for every arc on the blue-side list. 'Took for-flippin'-EVER to finish, since I was soloing them. But she handled the missions just fine.

My concern would be the effect it would have on solos and duo/trio/"small team" players... The "Oh crud. We're just going to get *wrecked* by Rewritten Arc X. Because neither of us is Archetype Y or Powerset Z"-situation. One of the things that really makes this game great, at least in my opinion, is its flexibility. Want to run on a full team of 8? It supports that. Want to solo? You can do that, too. Want to team up with a couple of besties and smack some Council goons around while you're having a IC pun-war in team chat? Yep! The game works just fine for a small team. And, just as importantly, with some mission-scale tinkering you can do those things with just about ANY character, or combination of them. All-Defender TF? All-Melee ship raid? Two crazy Stalkers and a Brute? A matched pair of Illusion Controllers? It all works just fine. Each situation has its merits and each has its fans. I've done all of those things myself. That makes me very, VERY wary of proposed changes that would threaten that flexibility. Like adding or rewriting content to "encourage" (ie: add a de facto requirement-) for specific team/character compositions.

I have to say, I've had a great time with most of the PUGs I've joined on Everlasting. I've met some really fun people... A couple of assholes? Sure. That's inevitable, humans being like we are. But for the most part it's been good fun, chaos and all. /salutes, grabs her Time defender and jumps into the middle of the next massive pile of goons, right beside some crazy gnome of a scrapper with a sword twice as tall as he is. XD

So. This is The Red Traveller… my "unicorn" Kinetic Melee/Fire Aura Stalker. Hitting 50. There are no longer NO CHARACTERS AT 50 with that powersets/AT combination. There's at least one. ^_^

*chuckles* I play Oranbegan magi... So, I kind-of already have my "fantasy genre" characters... in the form of my ancient, body-snatching ghost-wizards... all up in this super-hero game-world's business. XD

Nope! NopeNopeNopeNope. XD

The Red Traveller (my KM/FA Stalker) just hit 40... Almost there! ALLLLLmost there. XD

'Was about to say... Yeah. It can happen to anyone. I've been prone to that with my Sentinels a few times. Not to mention the Brute. Or the Stalkers. XD

I ran that mission with a full team awhile back that had the same issue... Multiple ambushes camping the respawn point, which in our case included a fair few of the summoning circle Arcana (Who, of course, had had time to call up their full compliment of Demons-). We ended up disbanding the team and abandoning the arc after trying a few different things to solve the issue with no success. It's a questionable design choice to say the least... Rez point on the main map + stacking character-targeted ambushes that never seem to reset to a starting position is just a recipe for potential disaster.