PoptartsNinja

Now that somewhat fewer things test against smashing/lethal defense than before; I personally prefer to push for 30% or so positional (melee/ranged/maaaybe AoE if I can get it easily without compromising anything). Just enough that a medium purple is enough to soft cap defenses against most things.

I'd kill for a generic lamp (or other easily-hidden object) that produces colored light based on the object's secondary color choice. I'd also settle for a set of small, easily-concealed, identical objects that produce red / orange / yellow / green / cyan / blue / purple / magenta light in a radius about on par with the recessed flourescent lights so we can generate pockets of colored lighting out of bounds without needing to rely on the gigantic Items of Power and their hard-to-hide particle effects.

Claw Strike - Blaster Secondary - Primarily claws with a splash of regen thrown in for flavor. Tier 1 - Immobilizing Dart - Ranged, Minor DoT(Lethal), Foe Immobilize Tier 2 - Strike - Melee, Light DMG(Lethal) Tier 3 - Slash - Melee, Moderate DMG(Lethal), Foe -DEF Tier 4 - Frenzied Strikes - Passive +1% crit chance for each Claw power used in the past 10s (max 5%) Tier 5 - Spin - PBAoE Melee, Moderate DMG(Lethal) Tier 6 - Resolve - Toggle: Self +Regen, +Recovery, +Rech; PBAoE Foe Fear (Mag 2) Tier 7 - Reconstruction - Self Heal, Res(Toxic) Tier 8 - Critical Strike - Melee, Minor DMG(Lethal), Self +ToHit, +5% crit chance for the next 10s Tier 9 - Eviscerate - Melee (Cone), High DMG(Lethal), high chance to crit

The OG, unnerfed version of Psionic Shockwave. Night Widows are slightly more melee than Fortunatas so giving them a strong melee PBAoE at Tier 9 seems like the best choice.

You can see I'm at building at grid size 1/2, which is generally pretty safe and on-grid especially for those particular brick walls. 80% of this particular base is in bounds (I like taking advantage of the impassable invisible ceiling to make fake city skylines) and these particular brick walls are just below the standard ceiling height. They should be about as safe from base drift as possible considering they don't even line up at grid size 1. I'm just hoping maybe I caught something new/unknown that will help pin the problem down.

I found a little more evidence that base drift might actually be rotation-related. There is a brick wall piece in the same base from above that is now permanently askew: Here it is on one end: And here is that same piece at the other end: I've also got video evidence that the offset is now permanent for this particular piece:

I know, that's why I'm reporting something I hope might be a new detail in the hopes that it helps the dev team pin the problem down.

I noticed something while working on base drift on the Brick Wall (Large) items. When drifted items are selected at certain levels of precision, it appears they may have actually rotated on the Z-axis, which I think has probably incrementally shifted their X/Y coordinates: After repairing the drift this rotation seems to go away: I only really noticed this because these particular items are so long.

Brutes really want to be the first in to take the agro, because they need that initial burst of agro to boost their fury. What if they had an out-of-combat bonus to all their defense/resistance sets that lingered for say 2-3 seconds after the fight started then reverted back to normal values? Something that would make them the alpha strike absorber while at the same time forcing them to deal with the spawn via damage like they do now?

Ah, my apologies, I don't know the specifics of how the actual IOs work, just vague recollections of a conversation with Pohsyb back in the day about how knockback scaled and personal experience watching enemy stats while running repulsion field with a KB to KD IO both prior to and after the change to the power. Prior to the change the field would still subtract 1% max end per target about once every second or so, but only score an actual knockdown about once every six to ten seconds. After the change the knockdowns were still firing at the same rate. The TLDR is, mechanics aside, Repulsion Field being very unreliable if KB to KD is slotted is the intended design of the power. Turning the player into a permanent mobile earthquake / bonfire would be inordinately strong.

This is one of the reasons why I think Storm/Devices is going to be the secret power combo.

This is by design. Repulsion Field fires a knockback every server tick, so if those were the standard 0.67 KB of a standard knockdown you'd deal a knockdown and then while the enemy was just starting the knockdown flop it'd get hit for a second tick for +0.67 KB or 1.34 KB, which would knock it back and while that was starting it'd get hit for another +0.67 KB which would push it up to 2.01 KB knocking it even farther and etc, etc. So instead it does a piddly something like 0.0016 KB and has to build up to 0.67 KB to score a knockdown, which it just barely accomplishes against foes that aren't knockdown resistant right around the time it takes the server to wipe the target's knockback back to zero. So you score one knockdown (maybe) every 6-10 seconds. Back before Repulsion Field was buffed, this would also cost you 1% of your maximum endurance every time the power hit for 0.0016 KB, so you could stand next to a critter and literally drain your entire blue bar before scoring a knockdown. The power would be more useful if the KB to KD didn't disable the repulsion but instead just disabled the knockdown entirely. Unfortunately the repulsion is tied to the knockdown so if you disable one it disables both.

Oh hey. Complaint rescinded!

I had the same initial reaction to and reservations about Jetstream that you do. It's not as bad as you're imagining, but I do think it'll make scrapper and brute teammates grumpy. I generally like repel; Force Bubble was my favorite power. Knockback and repel are two different types of soft control with two different use cases and shouldn't be used interchangeably. I still hate that the only way to turn off the repel is a unique IO. Sudden Acceleration would shut the repel off too if the power took knockback sets. The best direct comparison is carrion creepers. Storm Cell is a pseudopet that generates no agro and will try to chase the nearest enemy mob (or follow you if it has no remaining targets, but it's on a short enough duration that it following you will probably never matter). So the solid 25' AoE radius is pretty reasonable but can be a bit bigger/fuzzy because it doesn't stay exactly where you put it.

Flamethrower's improvements help to make up for the loss of Ignite. Flamethrower is actually worth taking alongside Buckshot rather than being in something of an either/or situation. I pretty much only ever broke out Ignite to try to burn down EBs and AVs, and Incinerator is a solid replacement for that task. It's also useful for tagging teleporters like Director 11 and the synergy it has with burst makes fitting it into an attack rotation feel really nice. Give the set a try on the test server if you haven't already. It really does feel like night and day when you're actually using it. The Flamethrower changes are especially nice.

Flamethrower doing damage during its animation rather than a half-second after the animation finishes is really nice, too. It feels like an actual attack now.

Pairs great with Pain Melee!

Comparatively minor, and I think this is more of a UI oddity than a costume bug: when female Gunslinger Belt 3 is selected it causes the Back Details option to vanish causing the UI to dynamically change size. I know this is to prevent players from having a Gunslinger Belt 3 and a cape but to my knowledge it's the only piece that does this and it makes quickly scrolling through the belts tricky.

I'm still allowed to miss Force Bubble. It was a unique power with a lot of utility that a PBAOE knockback aura does not provide. The new power has more general utility but I still almost never remember to actually use it unless we're fighting a hard mode AV. I'm also personally still an advocate for turning PFF into a selfish version of Dispersion Bubble. Leave all the numbers the same as D-Bubble but give it some inherent defense debuff resistance and make the two mutually exclusive. Defend the team and/or your pets or defend yourself slightly more reliably while soloing. They'd have to duplicate and change the name of the APP version so people can still use it to proc mule without doubling up on Force Mastery's actual shields.

I am soft-capped, and capped on smashing/lethal resistance. The historic use of PFF was to buy time for you to toggle Force Bubble on in an emergency since it took it a few moments to get going and you could make sure that repel would start ticking the moment you dropped PFF. Now it's a proc mule if you've got an open power pick and don't have a spare slot for a LotG.

Only if you want to instantly die because everything's still close enough to hit you with basic ranged attacks.

You put up PFF to buy yourself a second to activate Force Bubble and make space for your team to pop wakies and--oh. Wait.

Oh right, it was 3s before wasn't it? I saw the 2.772 Arcanatime and forgot it used to be even worse.

Stone Melee hits like a truck and has really pleasing sound design, it just needs an extra single target attack to weave in between the mallets. Tremor just needs to have its animation time cut down like Total Focus did. Forcefield was always really good, save for the mob-scattering Repulsion Field. I miss you, Force Bubble.