Blastit

I'm most in this group, I think. I like being in teams where it feels like what I did actually matters, where I have to consider what the enemies can do. None of this really happens in 8-man TA Council missions. The chaos is funny once in a while but a dozen spawns of effectively nothing but minigunners gets old. The thing that originally hooked me was how many different powers the enemy groups had and how the mix of assholes thrown your way interacted with the strengths and weaknessess of the AT and power set combos on your team. To some degree, what you actually play not mattering a lot can be a strength. Knowing that the TF failed just because you brought a corrupter instead of a defender with identical powers would be awful. But not having to care about synergy whatsoever except at a build level is just as bad. I don't want teams to need a specific composition but I do want individual players on a team to at least glance at their team members and think "oh yeah they're playing X and we're up against Y so I should look out for how I use Z". But IDK, maybe this is all because I started playing as a blaster in issue 3 and situational awareness plus target priorisation was critical. Guess the debt badges left deeper scars than I thought.

Why would this group necessarily be less correct? Perhaps the IO system is poorly designed and balanced, perhaps the relatively greater ease with which one can access the strongest sets is bad. I mean, people keep saying that the vast majority of the game was designed for SO builds and that the incarnate trials were only ramping up to challenge strong IO builds.

The question talks about defences in general and all the people who have answered that their characters "die plenty" could very well do so because they don't use any IO sets at all. Someone who plays fourteen DB/Regen scrappers and won't touch incarnate powers or IOs because they're afraid of making a mistake would be very unlikely to feel overpowered. An extreme example, yes, but we don't actually know the play experience of those who answered the poll.

This would make for potentially funny challenge scenarios, though. I would like it if this idea could be implemented on the test servers for a month just to fool around. It'd be great to sometimes have a league-style thing with weird stipulations. Spaghetti code willing, anyway.

The big con is that most high-tier powers have long recharge times and it's not that fun to play levels 1-20 having to wait 15 seconds between attacks. Additionally, some power sets are actually very frontloaded and you'd just end up with a reversed situation there. Stalkers get their assassinations pretty early, too, and Hide is always the lowest tier power. It'd be interesting to manifest in Atlas Park immediately with a nuke and could make for some funky early task forces but the game is straight up built on handing you bread-and-butter moves first so reversing it is going to get weird.

There's no problem with making a stone APP despite there not being stone sets for either AT. Not like a fire APP is only available to characters that took fire powers for their primary or secondary, and the powers you'd use to build the APPs are already in the game. It's as close to a freebie as you can get in regards to broadening APPs. This would make it easier to get defence toggles but Scorpion Shield already exists and it's not like creating new resist-based stone and ice toggles is warranted. I'm all for creating APPs of the missing themes as well as of all themes you can make with existing powers.

You agree on the suppression of your speech when you sign up for these servers, though. There are rules of conduct that you must follow which already include rules for what you can't name your character. Additionally, and I'm not sure this has sunk in, but there is a pandemic going on. The suppression of my speech through not being allowed to name MMO characters after a word the name of the virus shares is the very least of my troubles.

There is no such thing as an arbitrary point acceptable to everyone. There is hardly anything that is "acceptable to everyone". If you think that the GMs are going to continue banning word after word because "someone might possibly object" then I think you're very wrong about that.

I haven't seen anyone in game or on the forums complain about seeing people with just the word corona in their character name, so this seems mainly like the HC team deciding to apply existing policy for sensitive topics to it of their own volition. So you can challenge them about it, if you wish.

Humans can choose to stop at an arbitrary point because it just feels right to stop there.

That's a huge stretch. The current pandemic is, in addition to hurting and killing a lot of people, kind of tearing apart the US economic system and leaving over thirty million unemployed and millions upon millions stuck in their homes without any sensible leadership. Anti-mask psychos are fighting and killing people over it. So simply calling it a sensitive issue and instituting a blanket rule against use of the word "corona", because the GMs don't want to bother investigating every single case and arguing with people over it, is reasonable enough.

Conceptually, Energy Melee doesn't need any kind of combo system. Doing actual combo moves with fists and swords makes sense, using tidal power with water blasts works well enough, but there's nothing about channeling energy into your fists that really needs a combo system. If there was ever a set that could do with a proper charge mechanic, so your attack got bigger and more taxing the longer you held in the button, then this would be it. But I'm not sure that's feasible here.

Wouldn't slotting four damage/accuracy/cost/recharge quad IOs be the same as slotting one damage, one accuracy, one cost and one recharge IO each? So why would effectively throwing in two quads be over the top? Mind Link is maybe unusual because it doesn't allow pure recharge but you can already put in def-based split IOs anyway. I mean, sure, this system would allow for more granularity than current frankenslotting but it seems to me that it would only be relevant for rounding out those last slots in powers so you don't go over the ED cap while also getting another bonus. Never mind that set bonuses are sort of a kind of frankenslotting.

Thinking about what you'll bring to a game event because of how that event works and what other people bring to that event is metagaming, yes. Avoiding playing something because you just don't like it isn't metagaming. That's regular gaming.

Street gangs not recruiting women isn't exactly unheard of, anyway. I think that if more models are added, not every enemy group should get them. The Circle of Thorns shouldn't care who they kidnap and possess but the Council, the Family and the Warriors might have views on who's suitable as a street soldier.

Like snails.

That's a backronym. Meta comes from the meta-game, the game about the game. It originates in competitive games where what other people are playing is a big concern. So you could take the most broadly powerful option to a competition, or you could take an option that specifically beats the most broadly powerful option even though it might be worse against other things. If fire is super popular you bring water, even if you lose against electricity. CoH isn't really a competitive game, as such, but what other people are playing does impact the value of other ATs and sets. If the majority of people are playing sets that grant more than enough +def to themselves then support sets that grant +def are less valuable. If the majority of people are playing things that can lock enemies down, personal survivability is less valuable and you'd get less bang out of picking a Tanker over a Stalker.

The women all go for powersuit duty. Nobody knows why. It has baffled PPD statisticians for years now.

I think the 5% minimum 95% maximum hit chance is good for keeping people humble. Some variance in gameplay is good because you then have to possibly readjust your tactics.

A beast made out of shadows is as likely as anything else, really.

It'd be fine if you introduced a combination of super jumping and teleport. Would be funny seeing people going all over the place, if nothing else.

Sure, there's not a pressing need to do anything right exactly now. But the time and work needed to implement a suggestion is only about the practicality of doing so, not whether it's a good or bad idea. This forum is mainly about the quality of the idea. Who knows what kind of developer possibilities will be available in the future, anyway.

If control sets are specifically harmed by the removal of Hasten, wouldn't that be cause to discuss how control sets operate and what changes might be necessary? If Hasten is a crutch for control sets we should probably think about why they need that crutch in the first place.

Syndrome was right, tho.

You might not be supposed to be able to do every Praetorian mission in one go. It was after all designed mainly for veteran players, so being able to do something different on multiple new characters was probably a goal.