Steampunkette

Yes. I did the math, before, remember? Thanks to cast times you could get off that chain 4 times within the duration of the Empathic Investment. (Can't reduce Animation Times, after all). And thanks to Shockwave and Siren's doing piddly damage you'd be giving up your role as DPS to instead stun-lock a group for a certain amount of time (Unless you miss) based on the duration of the stun tied to Empathic Investment. HOWL makes sense. But there's no sane reason to keep using Shockwave when stuff like Shout exists. No matter how you slice it, the Blaster would be giving up a LOT of damage just to try and permastun some enemies. Period. And if that's the case the Survival to DPS shift is there to work on a balance. And dude, I don't care how long the Sleeps are. I don't. I just do not give 1 flying frog fart. 'Cause we can make the Stun last for as long or as short as we want.

You made a big show about leading meaning you get total control, Kelly. The ship on me thinking otherwise has sailed.

They're as much powers as Hasten or Field Medic are powers. They're powers whose only purpose is to modify other powers. I just made a whole pool of them, instead of one power in a pool. Yes, Kelly. I know how you disagree and why. I also know you're the kind of person who would DEMAND everyone on your teams use the KB/KD or KB/KU power and kick anyone who doesn't use it. Which is a big part of why I don't hold your opinion on this matter as being particularly unbiased. Make no mistake: Aside from Explosive Effort every power in this proposed pool could create big balance changes... And the only reason that one wouldn't is because the increase of survivability from KB over KD is around the same as the DPS loss from an ungrouped NPC during an AoE Slogfest. Making them Power Pool Picks is itself a balancing factor. Making these inherent to all characters would require some nerfing. Like... Immune to Recharge Changes style nerfing. FPU's End Discount being dropped to 7-10% style nerfing. Maybe some of these powers would be "Nearly Mandatory" for certain builds. But I'd take "Nearly Mandatory" over "Use it or I'm kicking you!"

Too much power as an inherent. Any and all of these powers would need to be nerfed into the ground from where they -are- to be made into inherents.

Put simply: Click Mez is superior. Yeah. You don't have to remember a toggle. But a toggle is a constant end-drain, sucking away just a tiny bit of your power that could be spent on an attack. And a lot of enemy groups don't really -have- Mez until you're SO level (Circle of Thorns being the big exception because low-level Thorns are monsters) But with a Click? It functions like a Break Free. Click it when you need it, and don't bother with it the rest of the time. Or click it right before you run into a fight where you're going to be dealing with me. Once it's SO slotted it'll always be ready either at the start of a fight with mez, or in the middle of it. I love click protection. It's so -rare- and useful and people always poo poo on it 'cause it's different from the Meztoggle or Mez across toggles powers. ... that said. Master Brawler exists as a precedent. So maybe the Devs have different thoughts on the matter. Or at least think there should be room for both in a given set... So let's see how it shakes out. Personally I'd rather have both options than only toggles. It already works that way. Has for a long time.

It wouldn't actually be "Cut Sleep Duration X by Y seconds" It would be "Mag 3 Stun Z Seconds". A completely separate entry in the power itself. So we could set the stun duration however long was appropriate. The "Tax" to get it would be a bit steep. One power you might use, another power you -MIGHT- use if your build has some KB or KD... and then a pretty powerful ability that makes your Sleeps even more useful than wide are long-lasting fairly fast recharging crowd control (that breaks on a single point of damage, granted). It's a big benefit, and I kind of feel like both Controllers and Dominators would benefit, -heavily- from the FPU power. Like... A lot a lot. Almost all their Primary/Secondary powers are clicks with fairly high costs! As to the KB Tax: Power Pools can be set up so you can take the first 3 powers without having to take any prior powers. So the "KB Tax" would still be just one power pick. Intangibles are just too rare. There's what? Four or five in the entire game? And what would you even -do- with an Intangible power to make it still useful but different?

Sell a "Customized Base Teleporter". So you buy a Special Base Teleporter. It uses the Base macro internally, but you make a macro that inputs the base code you want. /macro Invincibase powexec_name Customized Base Teleporter "Invincible-606" As far as the power is concerned I just typed in "/enterbasefrompasscode Invincible-606" and I load in there. Boom. Now I have a customized button for a macro on my toolbar that lets me go to the Invincible Base on Everlasting -but- it has an activation time and a Cooldown. I could make 12 different Macros of that power, each with a different base code tied to it so I don't have to memorize them all, but if I use any of them the Customized Base Teleporter goes on Cooldown and I can't use the others 'til it's off cooldown.

Better idea: Sell a "Customized Base Teleporter". So you buy a Base Teleporter. It uses the Base macro internally, but you make a macro that uses it with an argument. /macro Invincibase powexec_name Customized Base Teleporter "Invincible-606" Boom. Now I have a customized button for a macro on my toolbar that lets me go to the Invincible Base on Everlasting -but- it has a Cooldown. I could make 12 different Macros of that power, each with a different base code tied to it, but if I use any of them the Customized Base Teleporter goes on Cooldown and I can't use the others 'til it's off cooldown.

Definitely possible. Sentinels, too. Also Widows and Soldiers of Arachnos, PBs, and WSs... Rune of Protection would protect you for a limited time but it's a -deep- investment. But the Support ATs, Blasters, and Control characters, also Masterminds, would run a higher risk of getting detoggled, it's true. Of course they're also all at range so not getting the PBAoE or regular AoE mezzes aimed at the tank. (If they're on a team) and if they're soloing they could pop a Break Free ahead of a fight with mezzer mobs... But maybe we could or should make different ATs get different levels of benefit from it? Not 100% sure on implementation, after all. I threw this together over about 6 minutes of going "Oooo! What if!"

Focused Power Use is set up as a toggle with a long recharge because it's a -very- nice power! 20% End Reduction would save a lot of builds out there a lot of endurance slotting, freeing them up for more damage/defense/other survivability. By making it a toggle that gets broken with CC (like Taunt Toggles or Offensive Toggles) we create a risk element. Do you base your build around something that -can- become detoggled and suck wind when it breaks until it recharges? Probably! But it creates an element of risk to reward. Also it makes you hate Malta -EVEN MORE-. Explosive Effort: Understandable, but KD powers are less common than KB powers and the mitigation provided isn't going to be a comprehensive or big quantity. Especially compared to the potential damage increase for Restrained Impulse or Directed Force... Restrained Impulse: I feel like a cost-free toggle is too much for a Pool Power. Making it a Permable Click gives it a quick out of the box turnaround while still giving it an endurance investment (That gets lowered by Focused Power Use if you take it). Sort of like Hasten or Practiced Brawler. Directed Force: Doesn't add Mitigation. DOES increase damage values. Enemies that pop up but stay in the same area keep inside AoE powers while a knocked back opponent could wind up out of an AoE. Empathic Investment: I chose Sleep because it's specifically something that gets largely shafted in team play by AoEs. Fears don't. Neither do any other form of crowd control. There's no need for an olive branch. I'm not angry or anything.

It would give high damage ATs who choose one specific power and one specific primary powerset an amazing stunlock ability for 30 seconds out of 80. There's no other fast-recharging AoE Sleep out there. And no. You wouldn't be doing decent damage. For the sake of argument lets say you've gotten the Siren's Song recharge to 5 seconds. It has a 2.44 second Cast Time. So you use it once and then 7.44 seconds later you get another hit of it. Each one deals 60 damage at level 50 fully slotted. During that 7 seconds you've got 4.56 seconds to fire off another attack or two. Howl being the most obvious choice ('Cause AoE). Fully slotted that's 100.9 damage and you've just spent another 2.5 seconds casting it. You're down to 2 seconds left and all your abilities have at least a 1.18 cast time, so if you wanna stack that stun you get 1 single target attack -or- you can knock enemies away for 57 more damage. You stack it, you get the boss (Unless it's Arachnos) you're back to 7.44 seconds. By throwing off that long cast time animation over, and over, and over, you're more than halving your possible DPS for Single Target in order to lock things down. This is true whether you're a Blaster or Corruptor... Even Sentinels. And after 4 stacks, you're back to casting sleeps around That said. Maybe you're right. The easy answer is to make the Duration Different. See, this wouldn't just replace the word "Sleep" with "Stun" in the power. It'd be more like Fiery Embrace's interaction with Scrapper powers. A separate tag would need to be made at the end of the power entry for the Stun effect and to remove the Sleep effect. We could always just set the Stun Duration as half that of the Sleep Duration. Or 3/4s. Or whatever testing presents as appropriate.

It's going to get disabled. That's really not a matter of debate, I think. It wasn't meant to be turned on for global use and it circumvents a -ton- of other stuff. The Devs have said it's going to be disabled soon. The whole "PvP shouldn't dictate" blather is irrelevant. The "Make it not work in PvP Zones" blather is irrelevant. This thread should've ended 10am (CST) yesterday when Leandro said it wasn't gonna be available.

Or we could... y'know... ... ask. The Devs I mean. If this is something that's possible. But... It still wouldn't help the overlapping Taunt issue. And I don't think there -is- a way to fix that. After a few seconds you'd be right back to 16 total NPCs taunted by you and your pet both trading off who they are even if it -could- work. Which just means it's another Taunt Aura and nothing more. Though the Force Bubble/Fire Effects/Sonic Bubbles/Etc are not pseudopets tied to the character. They're Auras tacked onto the character model. That's how they're able to assume the same size as the target, rather than small characters having a big character's Fire Aura not lining up with their hands/heads/etc.

Sure. If you're a Sonic/Cold/Cold Mastery blaster you can spend 3 powers into a power pool to unlock a specifically great combo that requires you to use 3 different powers (or one over and over that does piddly damage) in order to maintain it. For 6 power choice investment and a click power every 10 seconds to maintain it and the ability to only use it for 30 seconds every 5 minutes (Which you could arguably get down to 2 minutes reasonably) with no set-slotting options for at -least- 2 of those powers... I think we're in the realm of "You've paid for it"

MAYBE they could create a pseudopet with doubled player input (You tell your character move forward 20 feet, it also moves forward 20 feet by sharing the W key input). But. Any kind of latency could cause desync and we're right back to "Attacking Nothing" territory. And if you get held and press W you don't move, but if the Pseudopet wasn't -also- held... off it goes. Back to the air-whiff. It also wouldn't help the Taunt issue. If you and it are fighting over the stuff that's near you, stuff that's further away will get un-taunted and we're back to 16 total characters taunted, just with you trading between yourself and your pseudopet because you occupy the same spot. I don't believe it's mechanically possible. I think it would fail at it's design goal.

Torchlight 2 has that capability. City of Heroes almost certainly does not. There's about a decade between the two. You've gotta keep in mind that Cryptic didn't have the technical prowess to create an engine from scratch: They bought one. An -old- one. Old -when they bought it- old. Old before they started working on CoH which took, like, 3 years?

It should be noted: This would be one of the -MOST- Laborious power pools ever created, even without balancing time. Because all of these modifiers are power-external there would need to be separate entries into every power that these powers interact with that could be activated, or de-activated, based on which power is currently active. Any of the Knockback and Knockdown interacting powers, for example, would -need- to be mutually exclusive. Also, rather than making them always on toggles I largely chose to make them click powers or durational toggles. This could interact with Recharge powers, it could not. The impetus is to create a larger initial endurance cost for most of the powers, and to make sure these aren't "Always On Perfect Powers". This is a Power Pool meant to provide some options and variety, not utterly change the way the game is played. As to Animations? Just give it some general Flexing/Build Up/Headgrip type stuff and maybe a small aura that can be made minimum effects. Give 'em all 1.6 or 2.0 animation times, and let 'er rip.

Based on a few brief notes in the KB to KD Inherent Toggle thread, I threw this together to offer up some interesting solutions to common "Problems" in City of Heroes and one power mostly useful for -fun-. Tier 1) "Focused Power Use" (20% End Discount, Toggle .56 end/sec, 45 second Cooldown, Detoggles on CC) Tier 2) "Explosive Effort" (KD to KB, Click 30 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 3) "Restrained Impulses" (KB to KD, Click, 90 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 4) "Directed Force" (KB to KU, Toggle, 1 minute duration, 2 minute Cooldown) Tier 5) "Empathic Investment" (Sleep to Stun, Click, 30 second Duration, 5 minute Cooldown) Focused Power Use: By creating an Endurance Discount Toggle we grant a power that basically anyone can take advantage of. 20% end discount -might- be too high, but it would give lower level (Pre-Cardiac) characters a bit more sustain at the cost of a power and power pool selection. Definitely dip-worthy, the higher end cost is partially offset by it's function, but could result in overuse of endurance resulting in crashing the power. Explosive Effort: Mostly a funtime giggle power, it can cause knockdown powers to provide an increased survivability benefit by forcing enemies to get back up from across the room. Restrained Impulses: Something a fairly decent number of players might enjoy, if only because it would allow them to provide a temporary shift to their Knockback Powers. Might be best to pair it with a small (5-10%) damage debuff if only to offset the damage increase of things like Bonfire. Or we could make some powers unaffected by Restrained Impulses to avoid too much damage-shifting. Directed Force: KB and KU are largely interchangeable when it comes to overall survivability, but KU createsw a teaming AoE damage increase relative to the survivability. By making people invest in the power pool -before- they can unlock Directed Force I think we safely offset that increase. Empathic Investment: Let's face it, sleeps are almost useful in a team-based environment. But a Stun is -everyone's- best friend! By making it a capstone we increase the cost of the increased survivability of changing Sleep to Stun. I think that's a solid cost to effect ratio.

I'm interested, again, thank you Munkilord! What's the rest of the pool? GASP! What if we made it a "Metapower Manipulation" pool? Toggles and Clicks that allow you to change certain functions, some of them exclusive (So no one can use the KB to KD and the 100% KB chance increase toggles to keep enemies in fire pits forever) So 5 powers makes a pool. Let's see... what could we add... Tier 1) "Focused Power Use" (20% End Discount, Toggle .56 end/sec, 45 second Cooldown, Detoggles on CC) Tier 2) "Explosive Effort" (KD to KB, Click 30 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 3) "Restrained Impulses" (KB to KD, Click, 90 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 4) "Directed Force" (KB to KU, Toggle, 1 minute duration, 2 minute Cooldown) Tier 5) "Empathic Investment" (Sleep to Stun, Click, 30 second Duration, 5 minute Cooldown) Yup... Making this it's own thread...

There are. But stunning or holding a target isn't controversial. Knocback is. There's also be no DPS loss from movement on a given Hold or Stun effect, so if we changed up the power we'd need to balance for survival to damage. In this case I feel like it's edge enough to be a thing worth considering.

So I've got this itch to make a Psionic Fortunata. Came up with an awesome backstory for her and a name that fits it 'Clique'. I wanted to do a build with as few purples as possible and as much team buffing as I could cram into the build. A little bit of added damage, lots of recharge for Mind-Link, things like that. This build grants her teammates: 28% Defense (All Vectors and Types) 30% Damage (All Types) 24% ToHit (And a pile of Perception if I want those toggles up) If someone dies: 57.96% MORE DEFENSE 70% MORE DAMAGE 75% MORE TOHIT Her single target chain is hold/immob/kb. Her AoE is piss poor ('Cause Fortunata) but her Nuke throws 800+ damage (about 900 if someone dies within 2 minutes of it firing off and it goes off every 40 seconds...) Here's what she looks like (Spoilered for length) I could probably squeeze more performance out of her... but this is a character who will completely shut down a lot of different situations by providing her team with hellacious damage and defenses. Thoughts?

Simple suggestion: Remove the CHANCE to knockback in powersets that give a chance. Make it always knockback. Don't change the damage of those powersets, mind you. Or the Endurance Costs or the Recharge Time of those powers. Just make them -always- knockback instead of having a 30-80% chance, depending on the power. It'd be a slight survival increase for the powersets that do use KB, but thanks to group-gathering efficiency of teaming, it'll slow down the process slightly by reducing the amount of team-damage done in the extra half second of getting back into range. But it will also mean that the entire enemy spawn (or at least all targets hit) gets bounced across the room by an Energy Sweep, so at least the efficiency-lovers will have their groups still packed tight, just 5-10ft further down the hall, or against the wall in a tangle jumble of limbs. There. I fixed Knockback!

This isn't "assumed". This suggestion came up on the Live Forums more than a few times. I'm paraphrasing the Live Dev response to the idea. It was a massive technical hurdle that they even got the one slot in that they accepted the UI being broken forever after i12.

Basically impossible. GETTING the Arachnos Costume Slot was an amazing kludge that broke the game's UI in a bunch of new and insteresting ways! See, when the game was live, you normally could only get 4 additional costume slots at levels 20, 30, and 40 from the 3 tailors and the Halloween Salvage got you a 4th. Much later they added in an additional 5 you could purchase in the store. But when Arachnos Soldiers went live, you didn't 'Lose' your first slot to the Soldier/Widow Costume. It granted you an extra one but it didn't -show- that because the UI couldn't. So you'd do the 20, 30, and 40 missions and it would look like your character had room for no more costumes because of the 2 costumes you got at level 1. But you could still get a 6th costume slot unlocked turning in Halloween Salvage. You just couldn't see it or edit it, so whatever was in your first not-Arachnos costume slot was added to that one, and you could only swap to it using /cc 5 I -think- at this point you can get up to 11 costume slots. But I don't know if the CC command has a 10 argument. I -imagine- it does. But it'll still be locked away and uneditable if that's the case. They could not get an "This slot is Canon Arachnos" toggle in place to allow you to do multiple Arachnos outfits, so they broke things to give you the extra costume.

Pets, Pseudo or Otherwise, are entities in the world. You wouldn't be able to attach them to the PC. Generally speaking a pseudopet is spawned either on the location you're standing or with a ground targeted AoE. ... and it just occurred to me this would be ridiculous not only in implementation being at best semi-effective... but also comically bad. 😄 So for the sake of argument let's say it is a Pseudopet that is somehow stapled onto the Tanker's spine. Just straight up riveted in can't escape. You taunt. Your pet taunts in a PBAoE Pulse or whatever. Due to proximity, it's always going to be trying to steal your aggro every time it pulses. The NPC AI is going to have a field day trying to figure out who to hit when every tenth of a second there's a priority swap between the two of you if you're wearing a Taunt Toggle aside from the pet. Ultimately, I don't think it'd work. At best you'd be WoW Style "Totem Tanking" with maybe a damage-split between you and the pet if it could be rigged.