PoptartsNinja

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.

That makes me wonder if making Volty truly non-corporeal (able to fly and attack through geometry) would be a good choice. I know Singularity mostly just has trouble keeping up because it's so slow; which is exacerbated by a lot of its powers also rooting it for extended periods. Would it help if they were told to start following more closely? So, rather than staying within 15ft or whatever their current limit is, they try to stay within 5ft and start moving sooner when the player moves away from them? Either way, semi-permanent combat pets (i.e. Phantasm, Singularity, Voltaic Sentinel but not Phantom Army) really need to inherit their player's current speed on all movement modes. If they kept up a little better I think they'd be more likely to actually be near the player when they start moving down stairs and etc and less likely to get stuck forever because the player turned two corners or hopped over a railing. A combat teleport of sorts might help. Something like: if player is more than 50 Ft and growing, combat teleport directly towards (or possibly even adjacent to) the player to jump over any railings or etc. they might be stuck on.

Back in the old days there was no Hollows, and Vahzilok were terrifying because 'toxic' wasn't a damage type. Back then, 'toxic' damage was untyped which meant it bypassed all forms of defense and resistance. Edit: Oh yeah, and back in the day most Rikti were nudists.

This is a harmless change, why not? Bring in an out-of-costume Swan and Mynx too. And Praetor Duncan to heckle them like that issue of the comic.

Every giant monster in the game aside from Ukon Grai was implemented before Leagues. They were all designed to be fought by a team of 6-8 people and maybe one or two stray passers-by. Even the toughest one (Lusca) can be beaten by a single team. If you've got an entire league bonking one, it'll go down fast. It's got very little to do with power creep and everything to do with sheer numbers. The only way to curb that would be to make giant monster HP and status resistance scale with the number of people in the zone, and while I know that's something the game can track I don't know of any mobs with dynamic max HP values. It might not be something the game can actually do.

The recipe one I know you can earn indirectly via AE. One of the tricks for that one is to gather a bunch of AE tickets and then purchase random low-level recipe drops from the AE vendor with recipe auto-rejection turned on.

It wouldn't be great. The problem with anything that boosts influence without boosting the IO Droprate is: it increases demand (inf) without increasing supply (drops). So prices would increase and then likely fluctuate wildly for a long time before finding a new (higher) equilibrium depending on how many people are running the inf booster and how quickly the AH's current supply of IOs got depleted. That might also encourage people to hoard their crafted IOs to see how or if the demand explodes. If you went the other way (0xp = boosted IO drop rate) I'd be all for it.

Influence being hoarded isn't being circulated, so it's not really a problem that it exists. I like your ideas for "fun" inf sinks, giving the billionares a fun way to throw money into the void is a good idea and using inf to trigger zone invasions is fun. I could also see that being used to grief costume contests so they'd probably have to leave Atlas Park out off the list. That said? There isn't a need to tax people for using the AE. That will either create exploitative situations, deter casual players from using AE to make personal or SG stories, and drive away the farmers. All of which would be a long-term detriment to the game. Enhancement conversion already costs money, about 60-75k per converter. That cost just primarily gets paid to other people instead of vanishing into the void. Making inventions already costs inf based on the level of the invention. It's about 500k per IO at level 50.

The only badges that can be earned in AE are the AE badges.