PoptartsNinja

If you're talking giving players control over the display color of their name in chat? I'd be all for that. While we're at it, could we get emotes to display the speaking/acting character's name color the way all other forms of chat do?

Isn't Shatter also budgeted as a single target attack? I'm fine with most cones being standard melee range, but most of the powers with less than a 90 degree arc aren't fun. Shatter's the exception (-ish, that animation time is brutal. You could probably shave a good quarter to half-second off the end of that animation). Psy Blade Sweep and Jacob's Ladder feel awful to use. Heck: half the reason Psi's pretty good on Stalkers is because they don't have access to that albatross. Psi Blade Sweep's animation makes it feel like it should be hitting targets out to 120*-130* arc at a minimum. The animation ends with your arms in the Naruto running 'reverse V' pose, but the psi blade sweep actually hitting a second target feels like a *miracle*, and hitting 3 requires actual divine intervention or a second player and perfectly-timed Fold Space shenanigans. Jacob's Ladder really should probably be a 30*/15ft that takes range enhancements like Breath of Fire / Frost. It would hit harder if it was. I'd still probably skip it, but it'd be a slightly harder decision.

It's pretty clearly a Hurricane reskin. i.e. when the Devs were making the power they found an aura with the right size--Hurricane--and used it as a baseline to build Genetic Contamination. Since Bio's IIRC an unfinished holdover from Live, it kept the funny knock-on effect of debris orbiting that the OG Devs didn't catch.

It comes with an EMP when it ends, which is a nice chunk of -regen to anything caught in the radius. That's been impossible to leverage before because the crash left you with 10% hp and likely all your toggles down unless you timed Power Sink perfectly. We can actually make use of it now.

I've always hated how many "unnecessary" resistances power surge added, but with the removal of the instant-death suicide crash I've realized there is an advantage to Power Surge over-capping your resistance on Stalkers, Sentinels, and Scrappers: increased resilliance against enemy -resistance. I still wish we could get a version of the power that didn't hide the character model, since the Gremlin form hides weapons like War Mace and Battle Axe. I'd think a version that just overlayed the gremlin over the player without hiding them would still be pretty visually striking.

This doesn't turn sleep into Terrify. They don't get hit, wake up, attack, and go back to sleep. It turns sleep into a hold with a duration that drops as the slept target takes instances of damage, making it a more reliable control. It's really good, you should try mind control out.

I'd also like to see my scorecard, if possible!

Much as I hate the Incarnate Blasts, I do think they're pretty well balanced against each other (with the exception of Cryo and Vorpal (Void is good!), but cones are always going to be a hard sell). Pyro's the fastest so it's a good fight initiator and the easiest to get solid results out of, mighty and void have great utility, and Ion is slow but guaranteed to do the most damage if used well. The trick to Ion is: it isn't a snipe and it isn't a fight initiator. Because it's single target, it has a good chance of only alerting its initial target until the damage component goes off, so if you toss it out from max range there's a good chance that target will have charged out of range of his friends before ion hits it. Instead of using it like pyro, Ion is more of a mid-range attack. You'll get much better use of it in any (or all) of the following ways: - Fire it at just the very edge of the mob's vision range, where they're likely to turn, walk a step, and then pull out their pistol or any other ranged attack option before they charge for melee - Fire it against a target on the far edge of the spawn you want to engage (rather than the closest target) - Fire it after aggroing the spawn through another means like a ranged aoe, a hold, or via just a good old-fashioned body check. Because if the whole spawn is together, through whatever means you choose, you're going to devastate them.

Even if they couldn't be combined, I think the dual inspirations would be more useful (for the ATs that find them attractive) if they replaced the standard inspiration drops rather than being in addition to them. So if you would've gotten an orange or a purple, you got an orange/purple dual; if you would've gotten a yellow or a red you get a ketchup/mustard dual, etc. Being in addition to the standard makes them compete for space, which makes it harder to get 3 to convert; so I always keep duals turned off. They're quite literally in the way.

Oh, that makes perfect sense to me. Except it should be psychic damage, to represent the sympathetic pain the mobs feel for the poor Regen user. It should also cause them to do the cringe animation every so often. Yes, that is a joke.

I could've sworn the -4s still did. There's a cutoff where mobs still give appreciable (if small) amounts of experience, and that cutoff has always been -3 or -4 to +4 or +5. I'm sorry, it's been so long since I've thought about any of this that forget the exact cutoffs. There's a hard limit on mob xp to keep anyone from sidekicking (back before it was team-wide level adjustment) vs. +7 mobs and earning millions of bonus XP. Likewise, mobs below a certain level are considered too weak to be a challenge--but the OG devs also didn't want to punish people for finishing off a mission they'd outleveled as long as they were only a level or two ahead of it.

Doesn't matter. Even if there are no bosses in the spawn, a boss of that level would attack you so the minions do too.

They agro because bosses of that level would agro. At -3 minion is gray, but a -3 boss would be blue; likewise a -4 boss would be green.

Maybe just a 'closest defeat to completion' that only shows progress on the defeat X badges?

I could see that working with the rocky crumble aura in place of the usual dark particle effects.