Vanden

That's exactly what this change is, and I sure ain't happy.

I hate it. Converting Empyreans and Astrals to Reward Merits makes it much easier to afford IOs for your character and alts once you reach 50, just by playing the game, thanks to the rewards from vet levels. Any lapsed players who left with significant Astral/Empyrean collections, expecting them to function as stored wealth for buying IOs, is going to return to find that a significant chunk of their wealth is effectively gone.

I know what the patch notes mean. Right now there's no reason to convert Empyreans or Astrals into anything until you need them, so if you want to use them for rewards it's better to leave them as they are because they have a higher effective cap that way.

Removing Empyrean/Astral -> Reward Merit conversions is going to have a big impact on any lapsed player with significant amounts of merits in storage. What's going to happen to a player that returns after a hiatus and finds that a big chunk of their stored wealth is effectively just gone?

No, no, no! This change is absolutely terrible. Converting those Empyrean Merits from vet levels to Reward Merits was the single best thing SCoRE did to help us fund our alts' builds. Without this feature, the ability for max-level characters to earn IOs and other rewards from just playing the game is drastically reduced. I assume this is an alternative to disabling vet levels in AE so farming Empyreans from vet levels doesn't affect the market, but this is a much worse option.

Did you manage to find out the name of the window that pops up in trials and zone events to show progress on the objectives?

I don't think it was ever actually changed. Like you, I remember it scattering enemies every which way originally. But the only way the power could have done that way back at launch would be using a pseudo-pet, and I don't know why the original powers devs would go to all that trouble to make the power worse. It doesn't make any sense.

OF gives 4 pts of KB protection, and that comes with other set bonuses, and enhancement to the power you're slotting it in rather than being just a slot tax.

You know, this makes sense, because I have to say, Explosive Blast does knockback away from the caster for every target, it doesn't send them in random directions. Everything that works for Energy Torrent works for Explosive Blast.

The live crew are the ones that added that trick.

Exactly as indestructible as they already are?

Player powers are going to be getting the same treatment in a later pass, this first one just targeted mob powers. Enemies with defense that isn't equally distributed across all damage types are quite rare, anyway. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

TVTropes got that info from post-shutdown dev AMAs, so it's pretty much accurate as far as we know. Ice Mistral was going to try to go straight, but is ultimately just too selfish and would end up going back to Arachnos. Scirocco would be replaced by Mu'Vorkan as a patron.

Stalkers don't get Energy Protection.

Being able to use it to heal living players is Rebirth’s extra effect. You take that away, you’re taking away what makes it Rebirth.

Every rez has its thing (every rez except Empathy, anyway). Thermal's rez is also a nuke, Dark's and Electric's rezzes are AoE rez and control, Rad's rez is a huge buff of the target, Pain's rez is a huge buff on the caster. Why do you think Nature and Empathy's rezzes shouldn't have something like those?

Why?

And you were the one who said:

I don't agree with your latter point; I think the reason we don't call Power-Boosted bubbles overpowered is because they're in Force Field. Powers don't exist in a vacuum, they're part of sets. Neither Force Field nor Empathy have the variety of potent debuffs, control, and other buffs that Time Manipulation does. When you consider all that Time can do outside of Farsight, and then look at how it can softcap an entire team on top of that, that's when eyebrows start raising.

Terrify actually has a 90 degree arc.

Being able to use Fortitude on yourself would make a huge difference in the set's ability to solo, a major weakness for Empathy. Along with the ability to self-rez, it also makes it much more likely that an Empathy character will be able to stay alive in a team situation where things get bad and their heals actually become necessary, rather than simply being the first one to hit the floor. The thing that makes Power-Boosted Farsight so broken is that it's AoE, so it gives its massive buffs not just to the caster but to pets, teammates, leaguemates, etc. An Empath being able to Fortitude themselves is still only buffing themself. I brought up Farsight not because I wanted to claim that Power-Boosted Farsight is some sort of baseline, but because being able to self-Fortitude is still far below what Farsight can do.

Sheathed weapons clipping through back details is basically inevitable. Even a certain triple-A game that released this year featuring dozens of weapons and capes has this issue.

Buuut, thinking further on this, they could just put combat level AND enemy rank on the right or left side of the Target window together, so it says "Level 18 Lieutenant" or "Level 54 Elite Boss" or what have you on the one side, then on the other have distance to target. No need for multiple settings with that method. Edit: Scratch that, don't think it would work. I forgot how crowded the window can get when targeting players, between level shifts and archetype+origins. Replacing SG name is probably the only way to get distance in there without making the window bigger.

That's where Combat Level goes.

Yes, it would be pretty strong, intentionally so. But if Time Defenders can do practically the same defense buffs not just to themselves but to an entire team (or even league) all at once, on top of all the other debuffs and buffs they get, I don't think letting Empathy characters use Fort on themselves is going to break anything new.