Megajoule

Yes, this. Just because you think it's a cool and fun mechanic that you'd like to see more of doesn't mean it actually makes sense.

Yes, you can half-ass a (potentially) broken, imbalanced, untested powersets much quicker than the timetable I gave. Should we? IMO, no. I've seen plenty of content (including new features and systems) released in that state, without any significant testing (or the advice of the testers ignored), that never gets fixed or even looked at. Sometimes it eventually gets removed from the game, but most of the time it just hangs around, with older players warning newcomers not to go near the land mines. (I could point to several examples in STO, but I don't have to, when the Shadow Shard is right over there... not that you'd know, if it wasn't this month's WST.) Oh, and I thought of something today I wanted to make clear. This is in no way personal, I have nothing against you, and your proposal is not significantly worse than all the other half-baked ideas for new powers and ATs I've seen posted here. You just happened to be the (un)lucky one I decided to make an (extended) example of. 😕

Balancing around SOs leaves out the first twenty levels. Clearly, to be utterly fair, we should be balancing around TOs. 😛

And I have. If you'll check some of the other threads in this forum, I'm consistently against "new powersets for their own sake" of all types, not just defense. This is just one of the latest examples. It's been shown again and again in MMOs that devs cannot reasonably be expected to produce new content at the rate that players consume it. This is just as true of new, balanced abilities (classes, powersets, etc etc) as it is of story arcs/chapters, raids and trials, etc. When they lag behind, people complain they are bored; when they rush to push things out, the product is usually of inferior quality. And we're dealing with a small team of volunteers here, not paid employees. Some of the threads here and in the Beta forums are struggling to balance powersets that were in the game when it closed, or all the way back to launch, and which have already been talked about for years. If this idea - ill-advised though I think it is at its very core - were to be greenlit tomorrow, I doubt you'd see anything on Test before the end of the year, or in a "final" (ha ha) release before the middle of the next. What will you do until then? tl;dr (again): if you're relying on new powers to satisfy your craving for novelty, you will be disappointed, the game will suffer, or both. IMO, of course.

^ This is a good post. As the saying goes, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

My admittedly selfish opinion is that stacking Rage is a bad, broken mechanic that should be gotten rid of, the devs shouldn't clone the set but fix the one we have, and those who want the damage spike without the crash (or one they can ignore/avoid/min-max around) can #%$*ing lump it. 😛

False. Some powersets bring new and interesting gameplay to the table, or fill gaps and provide utility that is not covered by the existing ones. This one, IMO, does not. This is true. Is it your intent to argue that we can, or should, increase the number of armor sets until those numbers match? This is one of several new powersets I've seen suggested here whose proponents seem to have given little consideration to the possibility that an existing one, combined with appropriate costuming and/or customization, can serve just as well to represent them on a mechanical level. Rather than adapt to the game, they wish the game to adapt to them. If I may turn to (tabletop) Champions for a moment: when you buy armor in that system, for example, you are simply buying physical or energy defense (what we would call damage resistance). Everything else, such as whether this defense is provided by a suit of power armor, a knight's suit of plate and mail, modern body armor, an organic carapace, a magical amulet or a force-field belt, is defined by the player's imagination and any modifiers they put on the base power. The appearance, source (technological, magical, etc) and so forth is irrelevant; only the effect matters. It is neither practical nor, IMO, desirable to try to model all of the above armor types individually in this game - and that's only a few possibilities, for a single power! But that doesn't seem to stop people in this subforum from trying. 🙄 tl;dr not every concept needs its own unique powerset.

Awesome track, that I actually hadn't heard before despite being a big fan of 80s music in general. And yeah, it fits Paragon City in all its... let's go with "ups and downs". 🙂 I figure anyone who chooses to live there has to embrace the strangeness, and even take pride in it.

Recoding the Incarnate UI may well be a task that's beyond, or too inconvenient for, our current dev team. (No slight intended; I'm just very aware of the Standard Code Rant and how much of a mess these things tend to be.)

As noted before, I'm all for doing away with Rage entirely the "feast or famine" nature of the set, and smoothing out the curve; no more spikes, no more crash and no more stacking. Steady and consistent performance that can be balanced against other sets.

It's the activity that gives the most xp and inf per unit time. But those aren't the "rewards" I seek. Heck, for me, farming is one of the least "rewarding"; it's standing at the door, or following along and tossing in buffs, and watching numbers fly and bars fill. The few times I've been PL'd (by a friend, or someone graciously offering for Support Sundays, or whatever), it was just something to get a new alt to SO level and what I consider basic functionality; that's where the "real" game opens up for me, and I thank my host kindly and go play it.

My own Huntsman (on live and now here) picks entirely from the Bane side of the tree, for this reason among others.

This was back in the day when they were still trying to pad out subscription time with inconvenience.

Man, and people say I like old music. ... well, I do.

Hi, remember me? Person of similar vintage in same boat? I have a follow-up suggestion for you, which is entirely serious: ditch the self-pitying backhanded passive-aggressive "well I just wanted to make things better, you sure showed me, yep I'm a big ol' dum dum." Process your hurt feelings, then come back to the table with a response that's sincere, not trying to be sarcastic and clever and take pokes at your critics while pretending you aren't. Act our age. As an example, I'll show you the respect of treating your actual new ideas seriously. (2) I'm down with putting the Croatoa temp powers in with the rest. I suspect they were left out simply because nobody thinks much of Croatoa (I sure don't) except maybe around this time of year. (3) I'm good with unlocking those TFs also. See above re "they probably just forgot Croatoa content exists". As for game balance, I'm one of those that thinks this is a good thing to have in general, even if people are having fun with the overperforming sets and don't want them changed. That's a discussion that is probably beyond the scope of this thread, however, and definitely one where I sometimes have to remind myself to not get upset or emotionally invested in the argument. Acknowledging your own inconsistency is good. I try to do that myself. It's difficult sometimes to not be irritated and defensive when someone else points it out, but I do believe that awareness is better than ignorance. If the awareness is that I'm sometimes often imperfect, guess what, we all are. I do remember those things you reference. Heck, I used to be pretty solidly against AE myself; I believed that the only proper use of it was for crafting and telling stories, and deplored farming and "exploits". Ten years later, I find myself not caring as much, or at all. Turns out that time doesn't just take away things and people we loved; it also grants wisdom and perspective, if we let it. That's all I have to say, for now.

There are plenty of "armor" sets already in the game. Pick one, and a costume for your character that fits your concept.

People using the auction house or the respec trainers aren't even interacting, they're just sharing the same virtual space while engaged in their own personal activities. If you want to see people, go to where people naturally congregate to be social. Everyone has their own line. I'd be upset if they got rid of the train and all the other zones and just put every mission door somewhere in Atlas, or went the LFG/ /enterbase route and had us teleport directly everywhere. But I'm okay with where HC currently draws their line.

Can we get this one, among others, added as a sticky somewhere? It keeps being asked for (by me, among others).

/jranger

The thing to understand about Numina is that, way back at launch - yea, even before we got Peregrine Island and 40-50 content - that was The End. The final Task Force. The finish line. And so, it was designed as a victory lap around the city, a counterclockwise ("widdershins") spiral out from the center, in which the players face all the enemies they fought on the way to 40: a "boss rush", but with mooks / villain groups rather than bosses (or AVs). Naturally, no one actually plays it this way, with the entire group moving from zone to zone in order; but that, I believe, was the intent. As for Dr. Q: Yeah, all of the Shadow Shard TFs are like that, and all of them are terrible. If I recall correctly, the thing was that they were supposed to have, like, three times as many unique maps, etc ... but they ran out of time and/or budget, like so many other MMOs, and they had to go live with what they had. Rather than trying to replace the missing 2/3rds, I think a much better use of dev time - especially considering the changing trends in game design even before the live servers went down (Posi 1 and 2, Yin, and Apex/Tin Mage, anyone?) - would be to trim that fat and make 'em lean, mean, and quick. (Reduce the merits to match, of course, but at least then people would actually do them.)

I sympathize, I do; I'm in the same boat. I too only got a smart phone last year, and went a couple of months leveling with SOs (which I understood and was used to, going back to '04) before I switched to IOs, (as I never before learned the ins and outs of set bonuses I could never afford on live). But as you yourself acknowledge, that boat has sailed. Those days, the people we knew, and the way the game was played then, aren't coming back. This is a similar game, but different. Look, I used to be a Taxibot. The devs, in the course of the live game, made our entire SG obsolete. But they did so by fixing the issues that made us necessary and desired - giving out travel powers earlier, combining the train lines, making it possible (and easy) for people to get their costumes changed without being murdered. IMO, the game is better for those changes, even if it took away most of the reason for us to exist. The hazard zones haven't been popular since... oh, the single digit issues, and even that was just street-sweeping/herding in Perez in the very early days. People have always gone there only when missions/task forces required it, and left as soon as possible. Only the PvP zones and Arenas are/were more barren. As for the Auction House, I love not having to go there in person to sell my stuff... but really the biggest part of that is not having to stand next to That One Guy who leaves his Spines or Fire aura on the entire time. And given that those two are, like, the most popular combo now... I mean, what you're basically asking for here is for characters to have to go to the bathroom - visit a specific place to conduct an unpleasant but necessary task now and then, studiously ignore anyone else present, and leave as soon as they're done. That's not gameplay or community; that's a chore.

I'm only now transitioning off/respeccing out of SOs for most of my characters (nearly all of which are 50), having leveled them that way - expensive though it can get, replacing them every 5 levels - because I'm an oldbie and I understand SOs. IOs, especially set IOs, I'm only now starting to figure out, years after Issue 9. (Per last page, back on live I often simply couldn't afford the really good ones, so I never learned.)

This was me, back when the game was live. I maintained a continuous subscription from the date I started playing right up to the end (even after it went sub-optional). Sometimes I'd go play other games for a while, but I always came back. And now here I am, again.

Oh yeah. I read the thread title and thought, "met Phipps, huh?"

I strongly suspect that in this case, the OP wanted the gun-and-katana action, and then came up with a name for it. They're not going to make it fit the name better, they're gonna change the name to fit what they want.