Steampunkette

I'm not reporting it and it doesn't seem like a statement worth a warning, anyhow. Anywho. Yeah. There's ways to make stacking Sentinels on a team better than it is currently, which was all I was looking to highlight.

This is -WHY- I'm saying you're comparing apples to carburetors: None of those archetypes boost the entire team's damage with their inherents. Their inherents are entirely internal, self-contained, and provide benefits only to themselves. Sentinels are the only AT in the game whose inherent applies externally. And that is where the problem lies. Their inherent doesn't stack from multiple Sentinels, so you can only benefit from -one- sentinel on the team. What you're doing, here, is strawmanning the absolute shit out of my position by trying to claim that I'm "Only talking about the inherents of all the classes" which is not what I'm doing. My argument is that the Sentinel's inherent makes it worse to have more than one of them on your team instead of picking up pretty much any other AT there is. That their inherent not stacking with other sentinels makes two sentinels a weaker choice than one sentinel and any other DPS AT in the game.

You are comparing apples to carburetors. Yes. The inherent of a MM or a VEAT or a Blaster or any number of other classes does nothing for the team. The Sentinel's, SPECIFICALLY, does. And only one of them can provide their benefit on a hard target at a time. Which makes additional Sentinels redundant. "But they can do damage!" So can ANY OTHER ARCHETYPE while also bringing Crits, Fury, Domination, or in the case of VEATs their built in AoE buffs to the entire team. A Dominator brings more damage to the fight than a second Sentinel. Which is BIZARRE since Dominators have a lower damage scalar. Sentinel Energy Blast at 50 Power Bolt: 61.17 Power Blast: 100.32 Power Burst: 129.69 Focused Power Bolt: 178.62 Dominator Energy Assault at 50 Power Bolt: 52.83 Power Blast: 103.55 Sniper Blast: 237.74 Power Burst: 236.04 Sure, the Sentinel's secondary makes them more survivable. And if the target is Vulnerable their damage will go up, considerably... but if you've got a Sentinel on the team already: SO WILL THE DOMINATOR'S. For standard content, this isn't highly important. A team of Whip Masterminds with no pets will take down pretty much any mission you throw them at by rolling their face across the keyboard every 4-5 seconds. But at high end there are folks who will refuse a second sentinel 'cause they already have all the debuff they're going to get out of one sentinel, and a scrapper or blaster or stalker or dominator or brute or corruptor or VEAT is going to put out more damage than that sentinel, often while helping the team with their other powerset. Except Blaster, Scrapper, and Stalker, who will instead be dishing out way more damage than anyone else.

This isn't an argument against doing something to allow multiple Sentinels on the same team to benefit the group as a whole with their overtly offensive inherent... Multiple controllers on the same team stacking controls, or dominators, could be useful with their additional stacks of controls from their inherents... if the game weren't specifically designed to give them the middle finger. And there's nothing about a Mastermind that makes having multiple MMs on a team redundant. And not only is having multiple VEATs on the same team not a problem it's actively a benefit to the entire team. But Sentinels, whose inherent is specifically a single target debuff, are by nature less useful to a team if you've already got one, because one can make the hard targets take more damage, but several can only try to snipe the chance to dump Vulnerability on the target before someone else makes the attempt.

Ostensibly, sure, it could be done a different way. I'm just referring to how it's coded, -now-. Which is to not apply to a target that already has vulnerability on it regardless of the source of that vulnerability. Removing that lockout results in a 'problem' that has to be solved in one of several ways. I offered one. However, putting Vulnerability on two targets isn't terribly effective in most scenarios so it wouldn't be much of a nerf at all. Ignores level differences, but not resistance to debuffs. AVs and GMs both have resistances that already apply to all the other powers in the game from all the other archetypes. So it's not like 8 Sents would instantly reduce any AV or GM to a quivering puddle of goop. It's definitely true they'd probably remove or reduce the level difference ignoring functionality, dropping the potency of the debuffs against higher level targets by up to 60%... but if you've got some kind of alternative that would allow for multiple Sents to be useful to the team and have their inherents matter at all on high end content, I'm all ears.

So... potential solutions to make Sentinels feel like they have more identity and make them more useful in groups rather than there being only one on a team: 1) Tie -something- to Opportunity so that there's a cost to using Vulnerability, and make sure Vulnerability is good enough to make that an important decision. There's lots of options, here. Could have Opportunity grant Global Recharge, Accuracy Bonuses, End Discounts, Etc. Make it scale by Opportunity just like a Brute's Fury, and spending half your opportunity kills half the accrued benefit. 2) Allow Vulnerability to be applied by different Sentinels on the same target. Yes. The way it currently works, you -cannot- do that so that a Sentinel can have two uses of Vulnerability stored up without being able to dump both onto the same target. Just set Vulnerability's recharge rate to the same as the duration of Vulnerability -1 second, and make it immune to recharge changes and cooldown resets. Tadaaaaah!

Sentinels do better Single Target Damage than Blasters do. Sure, on paper the Blaster deals flatly more damage with its higher damage ceiling and slightly higher base damage. However, that doesn't take into account Vulnerability making a whole team hit that single target that much harder.

It's the best way to play! Whether I'm on a Dominator, a Sentinel, an EAT, or a Blaster, I start at range and wind up in melee, then casually shoot fleeing enemies in the back!

They're also pretty solid if you grab some Melee, slot them for survival, and dive into melee like a Light Form PB and mix up KO Blows and Cross Punches with your blasts.

So I will say: I haven't even gotten to permadom and this build is -fun-. I've got a powexec_location on my Glittering Column and I just drop it in the middle of packs. I slotted it for damage instead of taunt and it's my hardest-hitting AoE power, bar none. I love it to bits!

I have Fast Healing to 5 for the 7.5% recharge. And Combat Readiness for the 2.5% Defense (Vector)/1.25%(Type) Though in retrospect I don't actually need that too badly... I could shave off a few slots, there, to slot another Kinetic Combat into Boxing or Kick for 3.75% S/L Defense pushing that up to 43... As far as getting the 7.5% move speed buffs from double-slotting performance shifter with an End mod, or putting the Knockback into Kinetic Combat: I'm already 0.5mph off the speed cap with just Infiltration and Sprint. And over the jump speed cap. Still! Very helpful, thank you!

It's ninja run, but enhanceable! I love it!

1) Stealth is nice to have sometimes, even if it's not a lot. 2) The verticality fits a character with super strength, too. 3) I feel like Infiltration gets so little love in the community. 4) At maxed out movement, the speed difference on flat terrain isn't that big, but the verticality of it makes it more generally useful than Superspeed in cluttered environments.

I'd love it if we had 'Plant Blast' with some Thorns stuff in it and a separate 'Nature Blast' set that's more animal-centric like Savage Assault/Beast MM powers. Like a plant blast "Thorncrash" targeted AoE where it plays the AoE thorns hold animation on all targets at 300% normal speed with Lethal/Toxic damage. Versus "Howl of Twilight" as a targeted AoE for Nature Blast that briefly has a Dire Wolf appear and do a big howl (complete with the dome effect) for a hit of Smashing/Energy. Or an "Infestation" power where you put a swarm of flies on your target as a DoT and then they generate the bio armor aura. And any enemy within the bio armor aura gets the DoT spread to them for 5-8 seconds or something. And then you could use the Corrosive Enzymes animation for plant blast to hit an enemy with a big splash of toxic damage as one of the first 2-3 attacks in the powerset. That would be cool.

You are deeply correct on the power-variety of the forms. How when you're in Nova Form you're using early power picks rather than later-game power picks like Solar Flare or Dawnstrike. You can't "Nuke" as a Nova, just as you can't "Blast" as a Dwarf. This is why I think the powers need to be collapsed and the forms functions as Scalar and Cap Modifiers. You'd still have your full list of powers, including Melee Attacks, as a Nova. But your Damage Scalars would shift to better represent a Blaster, including your Defensive Modifiers. So sure, you could keep your Resistance Toggles on while in Nova Form, and benefit from them. Light Form, too. But the amount you'd -get- from them would be lower. And you'd have a 75% Resistance Cap. Or. Hell. Make it 60%. So even if your Light Form pushes you to 85% in Human Form, it caps out at 60% in Nova Form. I imagine a lot of players would still take that trade-off. Do the same thing with Dwarf Form but also make the control aspect of powers (stun duration, knockback distances, etc) increase just like your defensive powers do. And give Dwarf Form a higher Base and Max HP while you're at it so when you pop Essence Boost in Dwarf Form you get the full benefit of it. Hell, if you wanna get SUPER wild with it, you could use power-modification structures to turn Energy Flight into Energy Leap for Dwarf Form and give them a spring attack in place of their Afterburner. Turn Radiant Strike and Incandescent Strike into short-ranged attacks with a commensurate decrease for the increased range for Novas while Dwarves get Proton Scatter as a melee cone with a commensurate damage increase for the smaller area on an AoE attack. And then, and this is the kicker... Allow people to choose not to shapeshift. Both in the 'Humanform is viable on it's own' idea, but also in the "Dwarf Form without model replacing" option, if it's possible. (I don't know if it -is- possible, given the constraints on Granite Armor, but it's a thing) That said... I wouldn't mind if there were also a bunch of "Alt Powers" spread throughout the Kheldian trees so I could make a PB that gives up Pulsar for a PBAoE heal or something. Where there's just more build variety across archetype identity for the Kheldians in general.

The reason I say that animation time is a part of the standard damage formula is, simply, Arcanatime and the game's core structure around TTK. There's a reason the game lists damage per cast cycle in the power window, after all. It's the rate at which you interact with the world around you, no matter how hard you slap Recharge into your build. A final arbiter of output. Hell, it's why so many top-tier builds wind up favoring short-animation-time powers because the DPS vs DPA doesn't line up well for testing metrics. It's -why- the changeling is so alluring, since you're able to outright -ignore- the activation times to increase DPS. Blows my mind how some folks will bend over backwards to try and excuse blatant exploits as perfectly normal and acceptable gameplay mechanics.

The Standard Damage Formula also includes animation time. Which you are specifically skipping. "Technically" correct my ass. I'm outright correct and you're hemming and hawing and hedging to try and preserve the illusion that the changeling gameplay loop is 'normal' but elevated play. It isn't. It's breaking the game for an advantage. If you're gonna play "But the Devs left it in!" as your canard, then hide behind that flimsy placard 'cause the Devs have also said they'll be addressing the Changeling after they decide how to bring Kheldians in line with the gameplay model they're looking to do. Because, yes, THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE ATs that needs fixing. That has been acknowledged, too. So we'll see that change come down the pipeline. In effect: Changeling is on borrowed time, as it well should be. But "We don't wanna mess with that mess of spaghetti 'til we have a plan on how to untangle it" is not "Changeling is the right way to play Kheldians."

Changeling play requires using exploits in the way the game's animation system functions to ignore the standard damage formulas and animation times that the game is based around in order to maximize your damage potential. It's not "Playing an instrument well". It's sneakily replacing every piece on your side of the chessboard except your King with a Queen and crowing about your ELO of 2800. You are fundamentally breaking the rules of the game system for an advantage.

1) Increase PB/WS Damage Cap to 400% an provide some debuff resistance This would go a -long- way toward making them more valuable on teams in general. And having some debuff resistance baked into their resistance toggles would make humanforming a PB a hell of a lot more attractive in general and give multiform PBs a reason to drop into humanform for longer than it takes to hit build up and a couple animation-canceled attacks. 2) Collapse attacks across forms. Bolt, Blast, Scatter, and Detonation, as well as Strike, Smite, and Flare (same with Emanation and such over on WS) could all be folded down into the base class so that you wind up less slot-starved with the form-changes and are able to use the forms as Scalar Boosts rather than having separate powers tied to the form-shifts. Yes. This would make the form-swap a little less useful out of the box since you'd still need to purchase the attacks that form can use as a separate thing... But that would make Dual-Form, and Tri-Form Kheldians a lot stronger overall without increasing the values of individual powers or anything like that, and would make it a lot easier to bounce between forms without feeling like you're underslotted, everywhere. It would also nerf the hell out of Changeling Builds since you'd be using the same attacks in humanform, nova, and dwarf, even with animation canceling.

What it says on the tin! Was hoping to maybe get a little feedback on this idea. Here's what the statline looks like with saturation on RTTC and such... As you can see, she's not capped against anything, hard or soft. The idea was to get a somewhat comprehensive level of defenses with some solid S/L resistance so that if I'm on a team with even a single Defense or Resistance buffer, she'll be able to softcap or get near cap from buffs. In either case, having 'decent' values in the other category just make things better overall. And then here's the slotting.... As you can see, not as much proc-bombing as is possible. Crushing Uppercut had to take Critical Strikes because the recovery time on Rib Cracker was too long to be able to toss off more than one attack in the Critical Strikes +50% window. By putting it in CU, though, I can get off an SB, an HB, and an RC if the enemy is standing long enough, but just -barely-. As you can see I went for Infiltration and Combat Jumping for some vertical with my speed, but I also went with Musculature Radial Paragon to get an extra 33% runspeed, bringing it to 92mph (148kmph) with a jumping speed of 78mph (125kmph) and a jump height of 82ft (25m). So what do y'all think? Are there things I could do better with this build while maintaining the movement? Velocitrix - Scrapper (Street Justice - Willpower).mbd

I'd be down with some account wide accolades. Not the ones we have, now, but things like "You have a 50 of every Hero/Villain/Epic Archetype!" accolades which give every character on your account a badge with a nifty title. Same thing with "You have 50 Magic Heroes!" and you get a badge that's like "Magician" or something similar. I think that'd be nifty.

Oh, sure. If you do it that way. I was kinda looking at it like an IO that improves Defense AND Resistance AND Healing on the individual IOs, rather than Resistance on this one and Defense on that one. 'Cause we absolutely can do that kind of thing. HamiOs show it pretty clearly with the +Control HOs. There are a couple power sets where that might be more useful than others, but it'd probably work fine overall since most powers just do one or the other and the ones that do both typically have the 'unenhanceable' flag on one of them. And you'd need to do the same thing for the Arachnos Soldier, Peacebringer, Scrapper, Stalker, Sentinel, and Warshade secondary ATOs, too. I would say "Widow" but their secondary is pretty much just Defense, I think.

You know... Creating an ATO set that can be put into your secondary, and doing the same thing for all the ATs, could be great. Except Tankers, obviously. You'd need to make an ATO set they can slot in their primary. Not changing what exists, but making a new third full set of ATOs for every archetype.

A lot of this thread reads like Giles Coren pissing and moaning in a 2021 Times article about how men aren't allowed to write anymore... Because in 2005 he wrote one of the worst possible takes on sex in an awful book. The passage that won him the award was a paragraph consisting of one run-on sentence 137 words long and then a 2 word sentence. The first contained things like "Rattled against her teeth" and "like a shower dropped in an empty bath" and the two word sentence was "Like Zorro". By all means. Go read the excerpt. Giles Coren, Winkler, 2005 Bad Sex Award is all you need to find it, though the keywords I've added above will help. A lot of suggestions, including many of my own, are bad suggestions. And other people may see the problems in the idea that we, ourselves, don't. In the same way Mr. Coren thinks that society shuns male novelists because he wrote something and didn't get massive fame and acclaim, and insults those who critique his bad writing, do we run the risk of holding our suggestions and ideas beyond reproach. Embrace critique. Go from there. Don't be like Giles Coren.

Starlight. ❤️