Shin Magmus

Neat, well the point of my statement was: when a set isn't played by very many people, its problems will not be as discussed. Only a small number of people actually stick with Seismic Blast and deal with the issues I've pointed out (like Aim consuming and wasting Seismic Shockwaves, instead of granting the effect). Everyone else is just uninterested or quit on the set, and thus quiet.

I genuinely kinda stopped caring when any of this was part of the discussion at all. You build completely differently if external dmg buffs are allowed or not. This is why procs are used to heavily on Advanced Mode builds, because the assumption is that every team will have a Kin and everyone will be dmg-capped (by someone else) most of the time, de-valuing damage enhancements and +damage set bonuses. I mean I'm just waiting for a new testing standard at this point.

Old Search was incredible. You could view only what you wanted to invite and send tells asking if they were interested in X: that was a fun system. Obviously using LFG chat or global chat channels, and waiting for players to contact you, is significantly easier. But I think about the old style of forming teams fairly often.

Yes OP, Yes. More customization options is literally just always better. 2 Options are better than 1. Apes together strong.

I mean I don't disagree or necessarily "trust" other Kheld players in-game, but I still let them be slugging along sluggishly on the team because most of the time I'm playing something else, not 4* advanced mode content.

Believe it or not, the overwhelming weakness of the baseline numbers of nearly all attacks available to PB and WS (remember, this means mostly human form powers because of basic math) is why they need a rework. People who care about the ATs and who care about the game are trying to get a good rework so that those human form powers aren't "worse than a pre-buff Sentinel" tier bad: because every AT should be decent. Optimized changeling gameplay is a band-aid that rapid fires so many weak powers in quick succession that they add up to being good DPS: but it's literally impossible without taking the shapeshift forms. This creates a clear line where the ATs require 2 specific power picks to be, for example "worth bringing on a 4* Advanced Mode team at all" - multiple sources including the best WS player. People who do NOT care about the ATs and who do NOT care about the game are just responding with downvotes and "feels fine to me".

Lauciana, the vet level 1,200 PB, actually had great data to this effect. She was making an awesome thread about it, but deleted it because of some people.

"Feels fine to me" is not a substantive argument, and does nothing to add to the conversation. OP specifically wants Shapeshifting powers to have a human animation to cater to players like you, who want to play human-only. This is done purely to give players more options and as a benefit, because human-only is that weak, and downright objectively the weakest AT in the game.

That's true: you don't have to take them. Unfortunately, you do have to take them if you want to not suck though. Human-only HEAT DPS is worse than pre-buff Sentinels and it's one of the biggest criticisms of the AT, as well as one of the things that needs adjustment the most in an eventual Kheld rework. Even more than that though, shapeshift powers unlock access to the "Changeling" techniques and fire procs like Performance Shifter and Power Transfer every time you cast them. The combination of the animation-cancelling and the way that those IOs work means that a Tri-Form Changeling PB has 800+ DPS and better sustain, while a human-only PB sits at 1/10th that value with 80 DPS: and they even have to click heal powers more often which makes them feel weaker and play even slower.

This would be great, I have a Traps Controller as well, but I think the nature of the way the powers cast just prevents them from being queue-able normally because of the game engine. I'd love to see a dev (like Cobalt) fix this issue in Traps, but I legitimately think it might be impossible.

Guess it's time to go for Master of ASF now.

This is a pretty important thing to fix in the eventual "bugfix all the things" patch because the enhancements are lying to the players. People might slot attuned sets like Eradication under the assumption that they're getting "enough" stats but actually be getting less.

I think this thread is just going in circles now and will keep looking back around to the "lead your own team, kick people if they're bothering you" part and the "just ignore it" part. But it definitely seems unlikely that the devs would ever add anything to the game that would be a real system which punishes any level of "leeching", relegating that to something that players police (or ignore), for themselves. Unrelated, just finished a PUG TF with an Empath with the Medicine pool and 0 set bonuses. If they had stayed at the doorway the entire time, their level of contribution would've been about the same. That stuff ends up basically being leeching and I just tolerate that I run TFs a with 6 or 7 people sometimes: c'est la vie.

Seems defeatist to me but you do you, I find teams doing starred ITFs still and that's much older than starred LGTF. It's just important to remember that I was talking about Omega K'Ong, who 1: is very definitively a superboss and 2: is an optional fight even on 4*. You can just fight regular K'Ong instead and finish the run.

K, well the alternative is aggressive-aggressive where you kick everyone leeching. Quietly accepting it and carrying them seems to be the more palatable alternative to everyone so far. That's CoH.

AA, wouldn't this have been faster if you toggled on your Hybrid before summoning the pets? Everyone says that pets inherit Assault Hybrid powers but only if it's toggled on before they are summoned.

The effort is fine, but there's a limit to how much I'm going to care (especially about leeching) when the game is this easy and the reactions to calling someone out are worse than the non-reactions to letting them be AFK or useless and just carrying them. If I really called out, and kicked, leechers on my team: that would be 99% of random Empaths as well. I'm actually in the camp that just passively agrees to carry useless people (who in some cases don't contribute even 1% of what I do) and just suffer in silence. We're going to win anyways: it's just going to be slower. That's just how the game is now, and making waves by calling it out isn't worth the effort: Vet Level 300 Empath deliberately not using any buff all TF and just useless slugging along as a "worse than Sentinel" ball of ineptitude... just keep your mouth shut and don't call out their leeching. Pointing it out makes you "the bad guy", so just carry them and move on. That's CoH.

Ice Blast is disproportionately worse on Sentinels than it is on other ATs, because Sentinels were made "last" (most recently). The person who was in charge of originally making Sentinels thinks that Fire Blast and Ice Blast are too strong, and gutted certain powers in the sets to move them toward a new (weaker) baseline. It's extremely unlikely that after literal years of Chilling Ray being this weird (deliberately nerfed) Sentinel-exclusive power, that the devs will consider buffing it or changing it to be Freeze Ray. I'm glad some people still want to see improvements to the set, but I just play Ice Blast on other ATs and don't even look at it on Sents. Same reason I play Fire Blast on other ATs and don't look at it on Sents. You might think I don't have a Sent, but I do actually: Dark Blast. Since it wasn't maladjusted like Fire and Ice, I've found Dark Blast (which now contains Dark Obliteration) to be a much more palatable experience on the AT. If you have a concept you want to do on Sent that requires Ice Blast, my advice is to just buckle up and prepare to deal with Chilling Ray and a weirdly nerfed T1 for the long haul: I'd be shocked if the set ever got buffed this late in the game.

Players of any game, will literally always try to find some way to get the most reward for the least effort: this includes "farming" and "leeching". You could play cat and mouse all day trying to add things to the game to curb this and you'd never actually win. Can't beat human nature. It's like they already said, just lead your own teams and kick players who don't meet your standards: you can control who joins your team.

Almost certainly because the lockout is a power granted to the enemy, therefore it doesn't discriminate between which player caused it. This alone should've been enough logical justification to axe the mechanic entirely. After all, imagine if another Ice Blast player disabled your Freeze Ray button if you tried to click it too close to when they used one of their attacks. That would be pretty messed up.

I, and many other people, won't play Storm characters any time.

Being too weak to bother playing just means we won't play it; shrimple as.

The devs could absolutely just make Storm Cell move faster. That's a very simple solution. They could also make Storm Cell bigger in total size, so that it *accidentally* overlaps more enemies more of the time. They're very cagey about buffing Storm Blast to a degree that makes it good at all, and I personally still don't understand why. Even with 100% Storm Cell uptime, the set is losing hard to Fire Blast and Ice Blast. It's sad that you also have to struggle to even play this set.

I like it. It would also be nice if the weapon list for Staff Fighting used more blunt instruments, and then the bladed weapons in that set were moved to this new Polearm set. It's very weird to pick a clearly edged weapon in your costume and have the powers deal Smashing damage: this is what currently happens with Staff Fighting.

RIP: it makes sense since you can't use basically any pool powers while shapeshifted, but still RIP Fold Space.