ForeverLaxx

You can adjust the display settings in Mids to simulate your numbers against +4 enemies if you want to know if you have "enough" accuracy/to-hit to reliably land hits against them, assuming no enemy buffs/player debuffs are in play. This makes it easier to plan builds without having to look up values and do manual math. I might like numbers, but if the system can do it all for me it's a lot nicer.

If they aren't asking, I'm not offering. I got sick of being "lectured" by people who thought they knew better way back in the day (generally they were the ones getting everyone killed). If someone is too afraid to ask for help, that's their problem. I'll find a new team if it becomes a problem or just run solo.

Nah. Like I said, if things are running smoothly, who cares? If they aren't running smoothly, I'll look for a different team or just run solo. I'm not interested in trying to hold someone's hand when they aren't asking for it.

No, but I don't concern myself with the way others are playing unless they're being actively/intentionally detrimental or griefing. If the missions are going relatively smoothly, what do I care if Johnny Two Toes is using Flares instead of Fire Blast or is keeping Fly active during combat? I never give advice either unless asked to. The only thing worse than bad advice is unsolicited advice, no matter how "tactfully" you may think it's being delivered.

Only UA would take the side of the judgemental teammate who asked to be on the guy's farm and then told the guy he quit before the farm even got started because of a "constellation of red flags." Your hatred of farmers runs deep.

Posting in a Diantane thread.

Was ChromatiCat taken?

You'd think so, but I know 100% for a fact that it happens because I've been sent messages I wasn't supposed to receive by contest holders and "potential" winners. I didn't say it made much sense. I said it happens.

In my experience, if the CC isn't just being held as a way to hand off a bunch of influence/prizes to their friends and drum up some PR in the process (for whatever reason this is actually a thing), most of the winners I've seen are either super-basic costumes (which do have their own appeal) or they happen to fill some particular fetish of the person holding the CC. I still remember a contest where the winner was just a white tiger girl in the standard schoolgirl uniform colored pink/purple. You can't tell me that particular costume was actually worthy of any prize, but it got the grand prize. For reasons. Truthfully, the only costumes I ever wondered the reasoning for how they win are the costumes built entirely out of pieces already designed (and often bundled in a preset) to go together. We're talking stuff like the full Samurai outfit or most of the robotic stuff. I know that a lot of the time, the way some of the parts are designed, they only really fit and look right if you match them together but you can create some really interesting looks if you mix/match certain pieces. You can even get around the poor seams some of them have with the proper belt or shoulder pieces. I spend way too much time in the character creator doing this so I know it's possible. I've never managed to win any CCs on any Homecoming server, though I did win a bunch (and ran a fair few) on the Live servers. I do still get the random "nice costume" message from time to time when running DFB and that's good enough for me these days.

If it helps you deal with them, you don't have to defeat them before the FFG is summoned. That summon is interruptable, meaning all you have to do is land an attack on them while they're kneeling and it stops the summon. This is especially useful if there's more than one Engineer in a spawn, since you don't know which one is going to summon in order to alpha strike it. Just aggro the group and throw out an AoE (or damage aura) to stop them. Damage zones are especially effective since you can deploy them preemptively and any tic from that zone will stop them. Caltrops, Rain of Fire, anything. I'm almost positive even non-damage powers will work like Quicksand and Tar Patch, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

@Mezmera See for reference: And that's the last you'll get from me tonight. It's bad enough you had a hanger-on. I don't much feel like banging my head against a second wall tonight.

No you didn't, but I'm glad you decided to chime in so I can remind you (again) that what you actually said was: Bolded for emphasis. There is no "separate rule" and suggesting there is implies other things might follow their own special rules. It's all the same rule; they aren't special. Thumbdown me all you want but the truth is the truth. You were misleading in your information and it's good to correct it, particularly for the benefit of players who obviously don't know the ins and outs of the system. I don't care if you were "trying to save time" because it was incorrect information. Deal with the correction or don't; I don't particularly care what your opinion is regarding said correction. But please, by all means, keep being indignant about being called out for being misleading. It's no skin off my nose.

It's also strange that my correcting of misleading information somehow made me the "bad guy." But I'm glad he decided to insert his foot in his mouth since it gave me a good laugh.

My post was to clarify misinformation. Pretending it's not incorrect when it's demonstrably false is a disservice to a player who doesn't understand why things work the way they do. Even if it was "shorthand" it was butchered shorthand that suggested one set of enhancements were unique with a special rule unique to them. They aren't unique and there isn't some special rule. It's important to be clear and precise when describing how a system works to a player who clearly doesn't know how it works. Considering other posters came in after the fact who were thankful for my clarification and how it impacted their future builds, I think it was warranted. Speaking of, in the future, don't try to correct someone when you're just adding false information in an attempt to be a smart-ass. I tire of forum PvP. If you absolutely must get the last word, feel free to reply. My posts have served their purpose.

This is the only thing I agree with when it comes to farmers and how to "deal with" them. Players shouldn't be rewarded for intentional disengagement and honestly, a lot of the changes to the AI and powers do facilitate increasing difficulty for AFK farmers while only being an inconvenience to current builds/maps for active farmers. Enemies that are mostly (or all) ranged with the AI code change letting mobs outside the aggro cap fire at you from range while adding -Defense to fire sword attacks (which, by the way, is a player buff too) told me they were trying to limit the ease of AFK farming without truly impacting active players/farmers. I personally think they succeeded in that aim. There are a lot of resources available, in particular those posted by Angel, that show how simple it is to adjust your character/maps to continue farming under the new system. Can you still AFK farm even after these adjustments? Sure, but it's a more involved process than it used to be and that's a step in the right direction IMO. I was going to avoid posting in this thread since it just seems like it's a hotbed of disgruntled players who believe they're being targeted with nerfs butting heads with the usual suspects pretending that I don't have actual evidence of what they claim isn't happening (no, I'm not posting it because it was given to me in confidence; feel free to dismiss it for that reason alone). That said, I'd like to think we can all agree that AFK Farming specifically is something that shouldn't be encouraged, yes?

@Frostbiter I'm pretty sure Mezmera can handle being wrong on her own. She doesn't need you to be wrong for her. For the record, you don't "summarize" something with incorrect information. There is no "separate rule" as she claimed, which my post was to clarify that misinformation. If you want to act like you have all the answers, it's best to actually have all the answers.

You have a strange definition of "summary" then.

They don't, though. LotG follows the same rule that all the rest do. The rule is that you can't have more than 5 bonuses that have the same name as each other. It has nothing to do with the power of the bonus with the way it's set up. LotG's 7.5% bonus has a different name than the 7.5% recharge bonus you get from some sets and that's why they don't impede each other. Sure, it's easier to just refer to them by their bonus value in the "rule of 5" shorthand comparison since almost all of the different values have unique names. This is a case where it's better to be clear about how the system actually works though. There's no special exception for LotG's Global Recharge bonus unless you want to consider the fact it's essentially a Set Bonus with a Single IO comprising the entire set (at least insofar as it's seen by the game).

It's almost like some of us have been pointing this out for awhile, but since we're not part of the club, we're labeled conspiracy nutjobs and pushed aside. At this point, I only log in when I feel like messing around in a world I used to spend most of my day in back in college when I wasn't working on art projects. It still holds some nostalgia and I like seeing my concepts in action. Designing characters is still fun. I'm forced to ignore the development process though, otherwise I just start hating it around here. Behind the curtain, it's no longer the game I remember, but at least the part of the game I'm allowed to participate in, that is, my character stage, remains my own. For now.

The aggro cap still exists. Any mob beyond that cap, which I'm pretty sure is still 17, will only attack you with ranged attacks but won't follow you around to do so. In a team, this means those extra mobs could just target and chase someone else, and if you're aggro-capped, taunting them off your team to get their aggro means the oldest mobs on your aggro list fall off, causing those mobs to now search for new targets. You can't herd an entire map yourself as you're suggesting. Even if you were solo, those mobs still won't follow you if they're beyond your aggro cap limit.

Because SS wasn't flagged as a Stealth power (it didn't provide what you'd expect from Stealth, that is, translucency and reduced enemy perception). Instead, it provided -Threat Range, which simulated the effects of Stealth without actually being flagged as such. Since it wasn't a true stealth power, the threat range reductions would combine and stack, providing additional "stealth" without having more than a single Stealth power active + SS. I believe the idea, way back in the beforetimes, was that you moved so fast enemies had less chance to notice you, but you weren't weren't technically invisible so they just made it a -threat toggle and called it a day. Now that the HC devs are classifying it as a proper Stealth Toggle, this old stacking function no longer functions and is the cause of player concerns regarding build/slot tax. I'm personally on the fence about it. On one hand, I hardly took SS to begin with and would just use a Stealth IO in Sprint + OG Stealth power to ghost missions. On the other, I can see chronic speedrunners getting annoyed that their usually already tight builds just got tighter in either power choices or available slots. Stealth stacking with SS has been around for so long, it's going to be a hard sell to lose it for some people.

Depending on how low you exemp'd to, each individual power you had available was actually weaker than an at-level character with the same slotting due to the scaling applied. The extra levels meant you had access to other powers those at-level did not, making you stronger than them overall. It should probably get reduced to +3 now though, if they want to keep it at all with this change. To the point of the thread, the only part I like about this change is the ability to take either T1 power from your Secondary. That opens up some builds and lets people trim what is often seen as a "useless" forced power pick for some powesets/combinations. I will say it's odd that that does mean Stalkers can now skip Hide, but that might not be something that's strictly necessary to have as a Stalker anymore. I know BillZ might make a Stalker after this change since he hates Hide. Beyond that, though, I don't think I'm really a fan of earlier "high tier" power picks. Early mobs are already balanced around the assumption that players have lower damage potential and lower mitigation potential and this change will either necessitate early mobs getting their HP/Damage buffed in order to accommodate a new assumption, or they'll be left alone and we're stuck with even more powercreep immediately after an update with changes that could have been "powercreep" but were explicitly (and pointlessly) kept from being so for nebulous reasons. It's at this point I wonder what is acceptable powercreep and what isn't. I do know that the mobs below 35 weren't designed to handle Nukes, though.

Seeing this thread just makes me want to suggest that, like how there's a popup referencing the Page update and other changes, there should probably be a popup telling players that the next Page is currently undergoing its testing and Feedback phase. You're required to have a forum account to sign up for the game so it's not like you're asking players to take extra steps to "get involved." I know some people wouldn't read the popup, just as they don't read the popup now and spam Help/General with questions that would be answered if they read Patch Notes, but it might head off just a few of the repeat threads like this one.

Not to mention that, due to game systems, Offensive Toggles are demonstrably worse than Defensive Toggles at keeping the player alive while active. Yet, for some reason, despite being worse in every respect, they still have to have additional drawbacks while the Defensive Toggles were allowed to "powercreep." It just doesn't make sense to me at all from that perspective alone. For most PvE builds, against the majority of PvE enemies, your toggles would recharge before enemy mez wore off. Even in the case of using a Break Free, your toggle would likely return on its own before 5 seconds elapsed. The trouble is, would you even still be alive before any of that mattered? In content where that survivability is required, 5 seconds is an eternity. You're more likely to just faceplant once your toggles dropped for any length of time. Players who understand the combat system already take advantage of this while a toggle is recharging. For instance, I'm already firing Fearsome Stare, Twilight Grasp, then jumping behind a corner while casting Darkest Night in order to break LoS, and despite DN having a long animation, the actual debuff starts working very quickly. 5 seconds is much closer to the time it takes to do all of that than the original 8 seconds was, but it's still slower. Radiation is pretty much the only set that this greatly benefits just because of how many toggles it runs. For basically everyone else, it's either a neutral change or a net nerf. I still don't know why they have a lockout timer at all considering how much worse these powers are compared to armor toggles, but the dev team decided they didn't want to "powercreep" them for some arbitrary reason they refuse to elaborate on. It's basically just Rune of Protection all over again -- making sure the status quo remains so.

And yet, it's only posted in response to negative feedback. I don't actually care if all "untested" feedback is ignored because it doesn't follow some form letter layout. My point was that the only time you ever see "go test it" is when someone says they don't like it. Maybe the dev team doesn't care about optics, but if that were true, why have Feedback threads at all? I'll continue to express my negative feedback for changes I don't like. I can run the numbers, compare the data I have to the Live server, experience a discrepancy that I already knew was there based on said data, and post my objections. Sometimes I'll object to the reasoning for a change because of how the rest of the game works (Rune of Protection's unneeded nerf, for example, or Toggle Suppression's original 8 second lockout). I'm not going to write up a dissertation for it when the process I used can be easily extrapolated based upon the feedback I'm providing. I rarely provide positive feedback because there's no point in doing so regarding changes already on the table. Those changes are happening if everyone loves it and there's nothing to talk about beyond bug fixes. The problem I have is that negative feedback has so many levers used to dismiss it that it feels similarly pointless. I don't particularly care how many times I'm told "they read everything" when reading it isn't the problem I have with what's done with it. I'm not naive enough, young enough, selfish enough, or stupid enough to think that something should be changed just because I personally don't like it. But I'm also not blind enough to ignore what's so painfully obvious regarding Feedback and the favoritism surrounding certain posters with regards to it. Just like with the Live Dev Team, if it was posted to the Test Server as a major update, it was going to happen. Maybe stop calling them "Feedback" threads so I can stop pretending I have a voice I guess. You could not pay me to get into a Discord server, either. I have zero interest in yet another "Discord community" spamming me for attention.