Xaeon

It's a compounded effect. As I stated before, Archetype homogenisation is a similar effect to power creep. Remember, set bonuses happened many Issues (content patches) before incarnate powers. This is no way contradicts what I said. IO set bonuses pretty explicitly remove the weaknesses of every AT and Set in the game and make for an enormous gulf between players who understand the system and those who try going for just SOs. A level 50 which is pimped out with set bonuses but doesn't really have any incarnates is far more powerful than a level 50 with all their incarnates but only SOs.

And uh, other than that one line -- which if you took it perfectly literally would just be 'blaster again' -- what exactly have you been able to gather? and where do you think the Sentinel came from? The Striker was intended to be a maximum damage melee primary/ranged (possibly ranged/control) secondary AT that was well in the process of development by the time of shut down. Intended to essentially be an AT where blapping was the whole design of the AT rather than a thing you could contort a build into trying to do/isn't just a suboptimal meme build strictly inferior to Dominators.

If Titan Weapons isn't going to get nerfed (and it probably never will; SCORE had six years to balance TW and never once touched it and the Live Devs also never even broached the topic of a TW nerf in its year of being on live due to the Devs under War-Witch having moved to a "balance upward" philosophy; and once Contaminate actually works properly on Rad melee it will probably be within spitting distance of TW) then every other set needs to be brought closer to its standard. There's very few people in favour of a TW nerf and the set largely works as intended; it's also a good pay off for all the waiting you need to do to finally get it to start shining once you have enough recharge and attacks to get a proper chain going. It doesn't need a nerf, other sets just need to get better. Rad-melee almost definitely will once Contaminate works as intended; so everyone else needs to get up to its par.

IO set bonuses have done far more to homogenise archetypes than Incarnates ever have through the ease of making everyone into a self sustaining damage-tank who needs no support. But of course if you even breathed a word of "remove or nerf IO set bonuses" there would be riots on the street. They also let you rather easily plug in intentionally designed flaws into ATs. Dark armour has bad endurance issues, a gaping energy hole, and no KB/U/D protection? Not anymore it doesn't!

Comes with them being basically the only 1-50 good guy faction you can fight since Wyvern, the Legacy Chain et al disappear off the face of the earth after level 30, the Midnighters are rare as hen's teeth, the Scrapyarders/Dockworkers are peculiar to their neck of the woods, and the PPD would have to arrest itself if it tried to enforce American laws in a sovereign foreign nation like the Etoille Islands. I always maintained that there should have been a NATO/US Military faction for villains (and sometimes heroes) to fight for that reason. Along with some other vigilante groups banding together to try and do good in the Rogue Islands. Maybe even kind of inverse mirrors of the Skulls and Hellions in the form of Energy and Cold focused vigilante militias to pad out level 1-20 content? Along with the Carnival of Light and other more heroic Praetorian Factions establishing themselves more in Primal Earth. Maybe even a Fae based good guy faction trying to oppose Arachnos' lackadasial attitude towards nature?

Carnie Illusionists are rivalled only by the likes of Corpus Nullifiers in sheer player hostility. Being able to make themselves invincible while still attacking you with attacks that ignore nearly all forms of mitigation no less and also having extremely high defense even when not invulnerable is some wonky as hell game design.

I mean like it or not, but Titan Weapons exists and all other melee sets have to be compared to the standard it sets; and SS comes up short to TW in every metric.

It was a ranged or assault primary and an armor secondary. We have it. It's the Sentinel. I'm 99% sure it was a reverse blapper. According to the AMAs: The Striker AT (Range/Melee DPS). From what I've been able to gather, it was a Melee Primary/Range secondary AT meant for people who like to live on the edge by essentially having zero survivability despite primarily fighting in melee.

Yeah. Psionic Melee aesthetically feels like it used to be two separate ideas for sets (Psi-blade and a Psi-melee set more like the melee attacks from Mental Manipulation/Psionic Assault) that were then cobbled together at the last moment.

As I said before, Superstrength's problems as a set run much deeper than the issues with Rage. It's that the majority of the set's powers are mediocre to outright terrible. It's a bunch of boring single target attacks that suddenly has a very nice PBAoE attached to it and doesn't really convey the feeling of having the kind of strength that crushes buildings and makes shockwaves as powerful as bomb blasts with every punch through sheer musculature.

The Striker AT was in the works before sunset and has a relatively simple concept to build around compared to a lot of other AT ideas. In essence; an AT built around the blapper playstyle mixing range and melee damage with what was said to be a melee primary and a ranged secondary. Beyond that, there wasn't too much detail. But I was left to wonder, would that ranged secondary be purely a blast secondary or would it be a hybrid secondary? Perhaps combining the control aspects of manipulation sets and the ranged damage aspects of assault sets from blasters and dominators respectively? There's also the question of what would be a fitting inherent and ATO sets for the AT, as well as how to ensure they don't become frustrating to play with due to what would likely be an extreme glass cannon playstyle, nor end up obsoleting existing ATs.

I think 2000 characters; the same maximum length as a Discord post; would be more than reasonable.

Power Pool Concepts Martial Training: Design Intent: Martial Training is meant to be something of an estranged sibling to Fighting. Offering regeneration and recovery, different animations, as well a greater focus on speed, Martial Training can help cover a little extra in a build or let you go ham in some weird melee oriented non-melee AT build. T1: Thunder Kick (As per Martial Arts, with the usual nerfs to pool versions of primary/secondary sets) T2: Bodily Harmony: (Toggle for +regeneration. It's not a passive as thematically, martial arts techniques like this require concentration and meditation.) T3: Cobra Strike (As per Martial Arts, with the usual nerfs to pool versions of primary/secondary sets) T4: Disciplined Endurance: (Toggle for a chance of a preformance shifter esque infusion of endurance; albeit smaller.) T5: Crane Kick (As per Martial Arts, with the usual nerfs to pool versions of primary/secondary sets) Sidearm: Design Intent: It's literally a pistol lol. Give yourself a little bit of extra range damage as well as a chance to quote whatever action movie of choice you want. T1: Single shot (As per basic enemy pistols) T2: Pistol Whip (As the basic enemy attack) T3: Marksmanship (Toggle for +accuracy, not tohit, accuracy) T4: Pistol Burst (Fires multiple shots of the pistol in one go, moderate lethal damage, reduces enemy defence) T5: Empty clip (literally half of the dual pistol ability of the same name.) Currently concepting: Arm Cannon (Ranged damage set), Mechanical Combat (Blaster secondary), Toxic Blast, Toxic Control, Toxic Manipulation, Water Armour, Water melee.

I'm also feeling some ideas for some pool sets as well. It'll be a bit before I come out with them but the ideas I feel most strongly are oriented around single pistols and martial arts attacks.

The Ward is also pretty nice; a quick easy means of putting some extra survivability on a team mate. Enflame is really weird and there's still some debate as to what it's actually supposed to do and whether it's working as intended.

I think EM could just be reverted back to how it was before the changes, and would still not be the highest performing set. The only thing it would excel at is being a boss killer, like it was before. Granted, I don't have the previous numbers to show how it was performing before (and I would probably fail at presenting them well), so I'm open to being corrected on that view. But I'd rather see the damage tweaked down a bit than keep the longer animations. Honestly even if you restored it to its prime it'd still be well behind the boss murdering prowess of Titan Weapons and arguably Street Justice.

Isn't Paragon a crappy rundown high crime era with armed neo-nazis and demon cultists on the streets in the open and something like half of the zones being uninhabitable wastelands full of monsters and gangsters?

But seriously, I loved the 2010-2012 approach to redside content where the player character villain is an unstoppable force of basically unrelenting evil who bulldozes everything in their way and makes everyone they meet their lackey or punching bag. The last meeting with Recluse in Redside Pandora's box might as well be called "the Destined one T-poses on all of Arachnos to assert dominance and all Lord Recluse can do about it is make angry remarks about the sheer big dick energy you radiate before acquiescing."

It's clear that later on in the game's life the devs thought that redside needed the player character to have more agency and be allowed to be more heinous. The Villainside Pandora's box SSA is basically all about the player character becoming a big bad on par with Lord Recluse and Nemesis themselves and taking over the Sky Raiders and Warriors outright to make their own army to directly rival Arachnos and the Nemesis Army. You even essentially straight up humiliate Recluse in front of Arachnos by basically pissing in his cheerios way past even his patience with destined ones, turning one of his lieutenants against him as a spy for you, then when you need something from him you blatantly defy his order of expulsion and show up at his house and demand him for it like he's a neighbour you want some sugar from. And in Who Will Die you can just straight up murder a helpless old lady in cold blood and psychologically torture Sister Psyche past the point of any hope of recovery and when Wade tries to control you you flip him the bird and punch Rularuu's powers straight out of him for having the audacity to ever think you were under his control. Other GR and onward redside arcs also followed similar veins; you are an absolute monster who crushes people's lives purely for you own gain and its not even because someone like Westin Phipps is asking you to; you're doing it for the sake of your own power base and plans and there is no one to blame for things like driving Praetorian Penelope Yin to violent insanity simply to get a pet psyker in your pocket but you. Or in Dark Astoria where after the big warm happy power of friendship moment you repay Tielekku for all her help by murdering her and Mot and stealing what's left of their powers to the horror of everyone else. If any future contacts and task forces are added to redside (and I can't see why not; contacts and TFs are by word of the OroDevs; not super hard to implement into the game) I think more should follow that vein. A Vigilante is a hero going way too far, a Rogue is in most cases; simply an asshole or someone willing to get dirty to get by. A villain though, going by the alignment missions, is a monster in the vague shape of a person.

Losing while figuring things out is fine for the player (as long as they feel like they *can* figure it out) but once they figure out the strategy/sequence to win they tend to feel like the enemy is cheating when they still lose more often than not. Even Dwarf Fortress, a game whose mantra is losing is fun; becomes significantly less difficult once you finally figure out its systems. Also failure in Dwarf Fortress is a cascade of outlandish and hilarious unfortunate events that's a delightful series of over the top dominoes falling. CoX cannot ever hope to manage something like that.

People generally want compelling but not particularly challenging fights in my experience of game design. Hard enough to give resistance but not hard enough to beat them more often than not once they figure out what's what.

Honestly the new MM combo I'd want to see is a MM primary with a secondary that picks stuff from support and control pools designed to maximise the number of pets, recharge intensive pets, and pseudo pets you throw on the field (I.E not so much actual controls and supports so much as MORE PETS from the various sets related to the theme), with an inherent that gives a chance to "critical summon" for twice as many pets as the usual summon to make up for your pets being individually weak with almost no real buffs or forms of mitigation; just the sheer weight of numbers. Pave your way to victory upon the broken bodies of your minions. It'd be absolutely goofy and dumb and I would love every second of throwing wave after wave of disposable cannon fodder at my foes until they choke and die.

So this looks to be a Defense set -- in particular, it looks a fair bit like Ice Armor. It probably doesn't have enough overall resilience to stand up with these numbers without a self-heal or a strong Regen component, particularly with that gaping Energy hole. I see you have both regen and a click heal elsewhere in the set, but I've got some questions about those. On the upside, it does have pretty strong S/L Defense (even with the weaker Smashing aspect). You'll also need DDR somewhere in the set to keep it going. Standard protection is 10 for Brute/Scrapper; you generally can include a handful of nonstandard protections in-theme for the set without 'paying' extra, so you're probably fine to throw Terrify protection and about 30% -rech/-movespeed protection in as well. If the effect is flagged to ignore resistances, there isn't a version of "resist that ignores ignoring resistances." There might be a way around it but it wouldn't be as clean as 50% resist. For similar reasons as above, debuff immunity on players isn't going to happen cleanly or easily -- particularly within a power that also wants to impose the same effect the player is ostensibly specially immune to. Regen is measured in % because it works on your HP total; is that 15 hp/s after Self Repair? For that matter, That's a pretty anemic version of Dull Pain, so I'm guessing this is intended to be a shorter-recharge power. What's the recharge? Does the maxhp stack with castings? Ah, yeah -- sorry, the brawl index specifically is obsolete; I linked you to that thread to get an idea of the kind of modifiers that apply to e.g. "Brute powers" or "Scrapper powers." And yeah the formatting is a bit broken after all this time, but you can fix it up into a spreadsheet or html table. (Unfortunately, the actual spreadsheet link from that page is broken.) I generally tried to undertune the numbers to err on the side of caution since it's easier to start low and work up than start high and work down. Oh the brawl index is dead? Hrm...gonna have to figure out another way to stat out the damage proc. It's meant to be an all at once proc like assault radial rather than an over time proc like well...most damage procs, not sure how that'd affect it since usually damage over time is considered strictly worse than doing the same amount of damage up front.

Honestly mercs could have permanent crashless serum for all of its pets forever and it'd still be worse than Bots, Thugs, or Demons by a country mile.

My old virtue main; Exo-Buster (or John Eden Matthews) was a twelve year old boy in 2012 and is now a 19 year old young man in 2019 and has mostly been put on a bus back to Britain. His story is mostly completed and he's content with life after completing his journey as a hero, to his place as an incarnate, and from a child to an adult. He sometimes pops up as a side character but his "arc" was finished off screen and there is little that still needs to be said with him. Gaela also went from a 16 year old idealist to an angry 23 year old and generally angry radical who's lost a lot of faith in the world and the way it works and has become increasingly disillusioned with working from within the system and a lot of traditional conceits of heroism (she finds the idea that she should offer her labour with no financial recompense obscene) but is still motivated by altruism and genuine heroism and empathy. Tyrannicus has been essentially reworked into a Thanos esque figure. A looming threat who has put hundreds of worlds in scores of dimension underneath his jackboot. An emblem of reactionary absolutism born of a lightless dark dimension who genuinely believes that he is on a holy mission to save those he conquers from themselves through the imposition of brutally dogmatic hierarchy and controls; believing that through conquest and the unspeakably violent "reordering" of conquered societies he can spare them the pain of fuure civil strife, ennui and wasted lives spent in pursuit of meaningless frivolities and decadent waste. He is basically a completely different and far more threatening person.