Dragotect

No, that's ONE way (and is only even remotely viable due to using an EXPLOIT that should be patched) to play a kheld. The dwarf IS a pseudotank, the nova IS a pseudoblaster, and the human is somewhere between the two like a sentinel before sentinels were a thing. A source isn't needed as the powers of each form are self evident as to what their roles are, but because of an EXPLOIT you get to fire off all your attacks and instant switch in an obnoxious display of visual vomit.

Tested it finally... It was a different playstyle, but I think with the changes to Memento Mori's adaptive recharge it'll lose some of that novel experience as not really worrying about WHEN I used that and knowing if I hit a few it'd be back fairly quickly really helped make the unique style of the set shine, and if I hit a lot I know it did a lot so didn't mind the long recharge. The set is really click heavy. Regen seems passive compared to this one. Also, it certainly isn't Willpower tier. I was running with a fairly kitted out build and started having concerns at +2 content (+3 with incarnate level shift), while my live brute breezes through +4 with a similarly kitted build and the level shift. I'm not saying you need to make it WP good, but the novel playstyle really off set the whole running at a bit lower level disappointment. It did work equally well against Carnival of Shadows as other groups though. I don't know if it'd be possible, but with the adaptive recharge thing going on, maybe somehow disconnect the rez aspect of the skill from cooldown or give it instant recharge upon player defeat so you can use it instantly even if it was still on 299 second cooldown so people are less likely to use it ONLY if they go down like most other self rez skills that can also be used outside of rez.

Then the argument still stands. This change ONLY negatively impacts the people/teams who already struggle to take things down in a timely manner by the very nature of how regen works. It should not be done as a blanket change. If you want to have it as the damage mitigation flavor instead of +res or +def of a new villain group, or specific critters without giving them specific regen set or WP powers, by all means have at it.

Hopefully meaning it would be a more targeted approach (as they also mentioned they didn't have time to do a critter by critter basis). Thematically it could make sense for some standard mobs to have better regen, while it makes terrible sense to do a blanket change. But yeah, if it comes up that they want to do a blanket change in the next patch, all the same valid reasons to not do it this time will still exist and I'll be sure to bring them up again. They'll need a GOOD reason to do this.

Luckily it was reversed in favor of just keeping the -regen resistance buff (which will have a much slighter impact). This is the fundamental of issue of MMO balance. There are so many considerations that should be addressed. What level? What AT of the over one dozen ATs? What powersets of the thousands of combinations of powersets? Is it solo or team play? Is it PvP or PvE? Is it endgame content? What kind of critter? Is it worth buffing standard critters instead of spending time to develop new mechanics for high end critters like AVs and GMs to make more challenging NEW content? I have come to the conclusion that MMO balance is just impossible.

False analogy. What they were doing would be akin to visually inspecting each spark plug to find out why one of your cylinders isn't firing. Not the worst thing to happen to a car, but a cylinder that isn't firing WILL have an impact on speed and mileage. Even if you might not notice it, unless you're paying attention. And I know this to be a fact as I had a cylinder not firing on one of my cars and never noticed until I went to fill up and got about 20% less MPG. If I hadn't been tracking my MPG, I never would have known until enough, or the right ones, failed that it DID become noticeable. And the culprit? A bad spark plug. No way you cut it, the test was good. They chose a power that hadn't been altered by other changes in the patch, so the damage output would be the same. They picked a level where they could survive a battle of attrition with relative ease to test the regen rate. They picked a critter with a large enough health pool that it has a chance to regen. And, most importantly, they weren't testing take down time. They were testing regen rate. It would be stupid to test take down times with ONE power. I tested take down times on a fully kitted out brute and found instances where it WAS very noticeable (master illusionists and high HP pooled bosses) as regen scales with length of encounter AND the initial health pool. It wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the goal for the change was to make encounters "harder" (read take longer), if it wasn't specifically noticeable on a damage AT that are already the harder ones in the game.

I'm not 100% sure if plant does -regen, but that could be why. The -regen resistance buffs are still on minion-boss critters. Which would mean regen rates are slightly higher, making it slightly longer to take things down. Slightly being the key word there, but even slightly adds up if you're taking down 100+ things. Also, this is the insanity of balancing MMOs. Yeah, electric control could very well be the new meta so if you aren't testing that your test is invalid /s.

A test that minimizes variables to isolate the impact of a change will never be considered invalid. In fact, they're among the most valid tests you can find. That isn't to say the opposite isn't valid though. If throwing all the powers at it produces no noticeable difference, then there doesn't need to be a change. As I stated before, to do so is specifically targeting the players/characters who don't have the damage output to deal with the regen, who were already having the worst of baseline critter regen before the change doubled it. While it would be nice to have regen, HP pool, defense, and resistance to tweak... it perhaps shouldn't be a blanket thing? I could see making a new villain group for a new TF have high regen so suddenly -def and -res isn't as effective of a tool to bring them down. But to double it for EVERY critter in the game is a bad idea. It's like doubling the resistance of EVERY critter in the game. Or doubling defense of EVERY critter in the game. It just isn't the way you balance encounters. You have to be surgical with those changes, ideally I would hope the changes would be thematic too. IE, it doesn't make sense for a Council grunt to have doubled regen... but maybe the Vampyrs (but don't double it, maybe increased by 12.5%)?

So... after doing actual testing. Yeah, this pretty much does what I expected it would. On level 10-35 you really notice it against pretty much any mob. You can literally watch them heal significantly while your attacks are on cooldown or if you're out of energy- which you're going to be more frequently be as you MUST use EVERY attack you can to try to bring them down quickly. Every miss you make is that much more annoying because it is more time they get to significantly regenerate what little damage you managed to do. It isn't fun. It is painful. This all gets fixed by teaming, sure, but when was the last time you could reliably get a team together in a timely manner for anything other than TFs? Who is going to join a contact arc? Especially if they don't have or have already done that contact- or heaven forbid if you want to read it, they can't and they also don't get the end of contact bonus. Even on high level and damage ATs it turns those annoying long fights into even more annoyingly longer fights (such as the Master Illusionist or the revamped Council bosses that have two health pools due to forced rez/werewolf pop). It doesn't make them any more difficult. It just makes them take longer. Again, I ask... Why? Why is this change being done? If you do enough damage, the change may as well not exist meaning it is an utterly pointless change, but if you don't do enough damage it takes already sluggish mob clears and pulls them through a sieve made of molasses. It is a targeted hurt to those already having the worst go of it. I do not understand this change. All I can figure is this is yet another attempt to nerf Fire Farms and/or power leveling in general by significantly slowing down boss and EB clears from a single player as they're the only ones likely to have a health pool big enough for the regen change to make a noticeable difference to a farm build (high damage AT or powerset combination-the least affected by the change already). But at what cost? At some point you have to think about the rest of the game, the players that don't actively pursue that stuff, and how changes affect that as well. The other thing I can think of is psionic often has a -regen aspect to it, and the -regen was overdone in psionic armor. So, rather than adjust psionic armor, the entirety of the player base is being hit with this change. If this is why, and you don't want to adjust psionic armor, keep the -regen debuff resistance boosts, get rid of the 5% regen every 12 seconds.

Why? Seriously, why? Why are you turning everything into more of a damage sponge? At end game that's boring, probably one of the worst offenses an MMO can make as it is a blatant slap in the face of "we want to waste your time" for no reason. I mean the damage sponge bosses (albeit through high/multiple HP pools instead of regen) you made for Council made them SOOOO boring to fight. Leveling up, especially solo and on low damage output ATs, this is a disaster. This doesn't address teams going through stuff too quickly as a team that floors a group with their alpha strike at end game will still be flooring the entire group with the alpha strike as regen requires time to be damage sponge. The new design is specifically going to be felt the most by low level, solo, and/or low damage ATs. For an indication of what 5% every twelve seconds does: If it takes 15 seconds to take down a lieutenant on a level 11 controller right now, it'll take about 17 seconds after this change. Doesn't sound like a whole lot... but there's 30 lieutenants between me and the goal of this map. So that's an increase of 1 minute for this one mission of this ten mission contact arc... and we aren't including the increased time it takes to bring down the minion that's with each lieutenant. AND if the boss at the end takes me down... heaven forbid I have to hospital and spend 2 minutes running back... I'll be stuck in a death loop without popping half an insp. tray of red and purple skittles. This change is just a slog. I mean, if the goal is to get people to "slow down and smell the roses" so to speak... you might as well get rid of the double XP boost from the S.T.A.R.T. vendor. (and I posted this here because there isn't a focused feedback page for this specific change)

This should have a negative hole (weakness to incredibly warped stuff, like eldrich horror stuff, abyss stuff that drives you insane if you mentally look into it too much), not lethal. Only resist should be psionic (that stacks with every toggle on to cap or close enough to it SOs will get you there, like Fire does to fire or Invuln does to physical/smash), and everything else defense with maybe one auto/toggle power that does res(all) to help fill the resist issue if they get through defenses. That's the theme I'd have in my mind of a psionic defense set. I'll probably make one (since I theme all my toons and have wanted a psionic armor one), but feel like if this is designed for theme it missed the mark. I'd say if any armor set is to have a lethal hole, it should be energy (think Dune shields). But as many have argued... a lethal hole is just bad as it feels like practically every lethal attack in the game is coupled with a -def.

If they aren't going to/can't fix the bug I wish they would do SOMETHING about the noise/visual vomit. For the last week I've had the same level 50 changeling in practically all the TFs I've run. I was elated to find out they got rid of the ringing with EVERY attack on peacebringers, and have actually enjoyed playing a bit on one, as ever since live it is the single noise in this game that gives me a headache, but with this garbage I'm to the point I'm about ready to just quit the team if one joins on my team to avoid risking them playing the infinite changeling glitch because they didn't get rid of the ringing on form swap. And no, I don't think that I should have to turn off my game noises JUST so I'm not bothered by exploiters playing their glitch.

It's probably an artifact from when the Rikti model was swapped. Since the mission has special characters that pull from the Rikti pool, the code that did that may not have been enitrely polished when the live Devs blanket swapped the Rikti models as the sub level 30 instances of Rikti appearing may have been overlooked. I could see a stray bit of code that tells to pull from "rikti" models not distinguishing between the old and new for this mission and since it doesn't distinguish between "rikti_new and rikti" (not sure what the real code would be) it can pull from both pools of models so you'll see both variants in the mission. OR, it was done intentionally to partially preserve the old rikti skins ingame for veteran player nostalgia.

Metallic 2 for women/huge and the sybil/sorceress serene dress. They keep teasing the latter 'might' come, and I'm kinda tired of waiting at this point after seeing them not just play with it in their NPC content with the evil warshade sybils, but prominently FEATURE they got to play with it on the Page 4 announcement. I understand full length skirts aren't ever going to be a thing, but cape clipping and quirky physics is something we've all lived with since what... Issue 3... 4? Edit: I was off... it's been since issue 2.

These poses only work while you're actively flying in a direction. They do not set your flypose, given they've figured out how to set other movement poses in the costume creator I hope they can look into doing the same thing for these

Damn, given the responses to my opinions here you would've thought I shoved a stick in their mother's eye or something.

Honestly, illusion doms are only good because of spectral terror (terrorize is like hold light, and WAY better than the AoE immobilize pretty much every single dom set has). However, they're incredibly lack luster in the damage department for an archetype that is already poor performing in damage output to begin with. Phantom army is supposed to make up for the spectral terror not doing damage, I guess, but the recharge is so painfully long it's almost not worth it until you get sets going. This, however, just feels par for the course as far as my experience with doms go. They really suck at soloing, teaming, controlling, and DPS until you can get them fully geared with sets. I think extra damage against CCed targets, like controllers get, would go a long way toward making them better for solo play. Or if their first two holds (typically single target immobilize/hold) did 50-100% more damage they would be fine for leveling solo. The domination lock down effect, if you can't get it perma, is really only good for locking down AVs on teams otherwise. The endurance boost simply isn't good enough for solo play as it isn't often enough and is done out of desperation FAR too often against groups of around 5 or risk endurance burnout by number 4. Not only that, but I swear just one dominator on a TF adds 5 minutes to the complete time because they AoE immobilize too soon- making all those tighter, more damaging AoEs from blasters/melee 50% less effective- and simply cannot make up the damage lost this way. I've only gotten minimal enjoyment out of my more recent dominators by focusing on their secondary set because that's where their damage is. Doms, in my opinion, are the absolute worst archetype in the game because everything they do is done better by the other ones. They're either blasters without the burst damage to bring down enemies before enemies bring you down or controllers without the support to survive a battle of attrition. They simply underperform on every regard while leveling, and I've rarely slotted them out with sets because I can't justify the cost to do so when I could have more fun with a factory setting blaster. Even worse, they're the only archetype where I'll ever scale back to -1 difficulty simply to reduce the time it takes to get through a mission. Essentially, before any other archetype Dominators NEED to be addressed but aren't going to because they're also probably the easiest class to make insanely OP given they're theoretically a control and damage archetype. And on paper that should be a win/win as far as soloing goes, but in practice they're just masters of nothing.

Or perhaps list the power- there's no need to be shy about it- and how it doesn't align with its description so it can be changed. If a power genuinely doesn't match its description, that falls under bug category.

What are you farming? Simply saying you're 50 doesn't give us enough information. Throughout CoH's live run, they tweaked and altered things to avoid inf/xp farms. Sometimes this included reducing rewards to 0 (like the demons spawning from certain CoT portal rooms). Sometimes, when those things spawned, for some reason a variant of the spawn was overlooked in the purge so they did still give xp. Then, when incarnate systems came around, they applied incarnate xp to ALL and didn't go through to find the xp/inf things that were devalued. Or is this simply that you aren't getting any influence, but XP (incarnate and otherwise) is fine? If that's the case, you've probably hit the Influence cap per character. Last I heard it was 2 billion (on live), this may have been changed post live. I can't say, since I haven't bothered getting there again.

I get this problem a lot too. Typically only with costume options that, when cycling through, can out right disappear (belt, shoulders, hair, chest detail, split options for glove/boot/shoudler). It is annoying, but I think it has something to do with the code marking the piece as 'null' when swapped out. This then resets the colors automatically to the 'null' setting.

The only realistic reason for this is RP purposes for in and out of character (and maybe using aliases for a spy character or something). If you're RPing, it's already assumed (unless stated OOC or IC) that secret identities are just that, secret. Out of costume, you aren't Giganator, in costume you aren't Carlos Carlosson. Honestly, even the psychic RPers (who would have a reason to know both) typically try to keep to this rule unless they're pricks who meta game. The only other reason-annoying and selfish-would be because you want to reserve 'x' amount of names by making one character instead of 'x' carbon copy characters. You have your SS/Invuln tanker, why do you need to make 9 more just by another name? And yes, not all the good names are taken (as someone said up above, and because I usually find something good enough), but that doesn't mean there aren't thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of good names taken that just flat out aren't being actively used or even used at all beyond level 5 (I go through and purge characters for this reason, since I know I have altitis). Your suggestion, to make sure someone doesn't snipe your 'y' name while going around as 'x' instead of 'y', just isn't feasible so long as they cannot figure out how to detach the character name from the account name.

Wouldn't you just run fly with combat maneuvers then? The speed/control would be the same as fly+afterburner before. Plus, now, you get a drastic boost to speed for 30 seconds if you hit afterburner.

I'd be fine with this if, let's say, for every 1 cool costume sets/pieces locked behind a grindwall there were 4-5 cool sets/pieces released at the same time that didn't require it. Or gave a regular set with a fancy version behind a grind... If I'm remembering correctly the glowy version of Ascension armor was this way. Or I'm crazy.

What does any of this have to do with end game balance?

No... Having just failed a pug LGTF because we forgot to make sure we had holds for the green mitos before starting I say Kudos to the folks that pulled it off on the real thing.