megaericzero

I'd been contemplating similar ideas on a henchmen-and-armor archetype, given the multiple suggestions/discussions cropping up about it over the past several months. I find it helps me, personally, to have power tables to visualize what full sets will look like, so here's some of what I had banging around in my head so far. Feel free to take any ideas from it. (I'm going to wrap it in a spoiler tag so as not to spam a wall of text the thread.)

This. I think aliasing the command with something shorter is simpler and more accessible to both the end user and the dev team than rewriting how the command is parsed. How about /toggleon and /toggleoff?

Were you maybe thinking of Boxing and Tough? Man, Flurry is so bad people haven't liked it since before it existed... (Which is probably true, to be honest.)

"I'll make my own theme park! With blackjack and [patrons]! In fact, forget the park! Eh, forget the whole thing." -Bender

If we're talking specifically armor, I'd say the ones that are the easiest to assemble a full set of powers for would be Water/Fluid/Liquid Armor which I posted about here along with a couple of other water powerset suggestions (self plug), Psychic Aura, Sonic Aura, and Temporal Aura.

Was Mass Hypnosis changed while I was asleep or something?

Neat ideas. No strong opinions, personally. Perhaps as a simpler solution for people who don't want to do mayhems/safeguards is to just have the radio/paper continue providing missions even when the broker/detective's meter is full. Maybe with a disclaimer at the top saying "[broker/detective] wants to talk to you" so it doesn't go over new players' heads.

I photoshopped them.

What category does your set belong to? I would assume melee but then you have a ranged attack and a pbaoe kicking it off, which is unheard of. It's also missing taunt/confront if it's melee. Here's some icons I threw together to illustrate what the set might look like at a glance. AspieAnarchy, Alchemystic, and I have taken our own cracks at a spear set in the past here, here, and here if you want to compare.

My concern with this is that you'd be incentivizing the character to generate aggro without management tools - DPS, armor, crowd control, range - and it's in melee-distance with no shields or mez protection. That can be a fast-track to having its face caved-in by a Freak tank or similar. (At least, I'm assuming it doesn't have high damage. My bad if that's not the case.)

Cool story, bro. I've been around since 2005 so you've got a year on me. 👍 I'm not interested in measuring [broad sword]s.

This. Parry (and Divine Avalanche) are utility over damage; they trade the raw power for a hefty defense buff to melee and lethal - both very common damage vectors for someone who has Parry to encounter - that can be maintained as long as you keep sprinkling them between other attacks. By all means, if you don't need that sort of thing (such as already having a defense-based armor), skip them for a pool power but they're a good example of niche-but-potent powers that I would really rather the HC team not touch and turn into a middling all-arounder.

Maybe a system message in the chat window? For instance, You may now change your costume.

It's referencing this post from yesterday:

As an option, I don't particularly care. Not as a forced change, though. Not without the ability to downgrade inspirations. It would be counterproductive if it upgraded something when I was actually saving it in case I needed to merge it into something else, or in case a bunch of inspirations dropped all at once before I could.

Erm, stun prevents enemies from attacking. Did you mean immobilize? If it's going to be a unique mechanic that everyone in the archetype uses regardless of power set, you may want to make it the/an inherent. Not that there isn't precedence - like Hide or Taunt - but at the point where there isn't even an exception to prove the rule and its so fundamental to the playstyle, you may want to consider not even making it a power pick.

That argument is a two-way street. Just because you personally feel it's good etc. Have you considered that some of us already looked at the "why" and decided the current paradigm is potentially sensical, relevant, efficient, and so on for reasons already stated in the thread? Some of us are regulars here that discuss these things or see them discussed repeatedly, including the cottage rule. It can look like we had a knee-jerk reaction to put down the suggestion because we've been through the song and dance multiple times before. (You should see how many times Magic Blast has been discussed to death.) And no one that I could tell was saying your idea for a mechanic was bad. Just reframe it as its own set. Beam Rifle exists instead of Assault Rifle with laser animations or Energy Blast holding a weapon. Willpower was seen as a viable port of Regeneration for tankers back in the day (more community opinion than dev statement of fact, mind you). Energy Aura was actually stated by the Paragon dev team as Ice Armor for Brutes because they feared Chilling Embrace would hamper Fury generation. And, again again, Kinetic Melee is just Energy Melee patterned after Claws with a Siphon Power-themed Build Up; it's just not called Son of Energy Melee.

Just stop selling it as Electrical Blast 2: Electric Boogaloo. Market it as its own thing like Circuit Blast. We don't need to shift the entire design philosophy to get a tangential set. Again, Kinetic Melee and Storm Blast exist. If you (or your brother-in-law) can live with the mechanics without it being electricity-themed, you could even pitch it as reflecting lasers or chemical reactions and have an even easier time advocating for its implementation.

Why does it have to be Force Field, specifically? Why not a new Energy Affinity with its own damping shields that can still use the bubble vfx? I ask as a person who has played Force Fields for 18 years that both thinks its performance is already exactly where it should be and who would not trade any of it for +absorb that turns me into some weird pseudo-healer, especially at the expense of my defense buffs' potency. The paradigm is not to have direct duplicate sets. That doesn't stop thematically-tangent, mechanically unique, arguably redundant sets from being made. Kinetic Melee on live and Storm Blast on Homecoming were both made even though Energy Melee and Electrical Blast already existed. Storm even has a chain power called Chain Lightning. Electrical Affinity was also made which - while it's a support set - is electricity-themed and centered around chains.

That can scale very fast depending on what you're changing. For instance, if they ever tweak Fiery Embrace's potency, pretty literally every damaging melee power has to be reviewed and changed. Add in duplicates and that number grows even faster. That's not even about balance concerns; that's just because things like Fiery Embrace are baked into every individual damaging power across every possible set that can be matched with Fiery Aura.

short, I'm interested in seeing your character builds. If you have any procs, globals, sets, franken-slotting, or incarnate abilities, you should be way more upset about those than inspirations.

Inspirations have been in the game for a very long time. The combat was designed with them in mind well before inventions - much less incarnates - and nearly as long as even Hami-Os, if not predating them given The Hive was added in issue 1. If you feel inspirations are undermining the challenge and ruining your fun, feel free to up your difficulty or abstain from using them.

Depending on how macabre you want to get, you could use "exhume" for the name of one of the rez powers. 😛

Could be any number of things. If I had to guess, it's to do with the latency between the client and server in regards to movement. There's a slight delay that makes powers behave weirdly when checking if targets are in range, among other things.

Didn't the devs say they would not propagate Null the Gull to more locations? Plus, IIRC, Null is the type of contact that doesn't talk to people in TF mode. Based on recent threads, it sounds like that is a fair portion of when GF tensions pop up.