Vanden

No player or NPC powers have more than one positional tag.

In the mission Check Out the New Dimension from Tina Macintyre, your character discovers a dimension where an alternate version of themself killed every person on Earth. Every character can get this mission, and it's always an alternate version of that character that ruined the world, which means it's not multiple characters visiting the same dimension. This means that every time you create a new character, you murder an entire planet! I hope it was worth it.

Aid Other's heal amount is identical to Heal Other, et al. Again, it wouldn't break any principles. Pets are overall rather weak, like little newbie players that didn't take any defensive powers and die very easily. The only characters that can make especially good use of them are characters with support powers to keep them alive long enough to actually reach their full potential. Boosting Aid Other's effect on pets gives every character an option to help them keep their pets alive even if they don't have a support set.

Aid Other would still be interruptible, shorter-ranged, and have a longer activation that those primary/secondary targeted heals. Giving it healing over time (ignoring cast time) on pets equal to those powers would not make it a better power than them.

Look at fancy pants here, posting from the future! or perhaps somewhere in Asia

Got pets but no way to heal them? This would give you a viable option. (Note: A typical single-target heal like Soothe or Heal Other gives identical healing to Aid Other, but recharges in 4 seconds, while Aid Other recharges in 10 seconds. That's where the 2.5x figure comes from, it's not like it's my go-to number when asking for buffs.)

Well, if you're a full-time flier but your only flight power is Mystic Flight, I'm guessing you have endurance issues, especially if you're running Tough and Weave and make regular use of Snow Storm. There's some things you could do to address that. First, move the Preventive Medicine proc from Frigid Protection to Health. The 50+5 IO in Health is only worth ~1.2 HP per second, so no big loss. Then put another 50 Endmod IO in the open slot in Frigid Protection. In Stamina, the strongest possible IO for one slot is a Performance Shifter proc, so put another one of those there. Next, Shiver is pretty much redundant with Snow Storm, so you could just drop Shiver and move those slots to Snow Storm. Last, grab Hover to use in combat. You're full on pools, but if you drop the Concealment pool you can pick it up, and even keep using it as a LotG mule. This will cost you one LotG slot, though. Now, if you're not attached to the Sorcery pool, that opens up some options. You could drop Sorcery and Concealment; replace Arcane Bolt with Fire Blast, Mystic Flight with Fly, and Stealth and Invisibility with Hover and Afterburner. This would lose you Rune of Protection, though; from how you slotted it I'm guessing you like it, so I'm not sure how willing you'd be to do that.

Because this went so well last time.

I made this updated look for Frostfire about one million years ago:

And what good does that even do you? If you're getting hit by enough mezzes to overcome one stack of PB despite having a defense set, you're probably dead from the incoming damage hitting you either way.

Ehhh, I kinda like getting powers that are easy skips, more room for cool pool powers. Plus, if every Scrapper had a ranged attack in the primary, that devalues the APP ranged attacks.

Yeah, you know the old saying. "Check, check, and double check!" Right now we only look at our fists once each, when our characters really should look four times apiece. You know, for safety!

Anyone remember what the reward for story arcs was before they added merit rewards? I distinctly remember the first time I finished a story arc, and the game offered me... something as a reward. This would've been back in issue 3.

Yeah, I'd say it's a big stretch. Blaster secondaries are supposed to be a mish-mash of melee, control, and self-buffs, but Weapon Combat is nearly all melee attacks except for Build Up and Athletics. Even Energy Manipulation, the melee-heaviest secondary, only has 5 melee attacks and 2 of them are meant as controls. On top of that, the sustain is both melee-ranged and needs a ToHit check, and the only other sustain that has to deal with that is Drain Psyche, and in exchange for all that it is way more potent than any other sustain. It also gives defense instead of some sort of heal, but Parry only gives two types of defense while heals, absorbs, and +regens are agnostic to the kind of incoming damage. I don't think it really works.

There's currently a subtle bug regarding idle stances with Claws powers. In the past, going back to the live days, when you stopped moving with your claws drawn, your character would idle in this stance: Then, after a short moment, your character would change to this stance: However, now the second stance is different. After a few moments in the typical "weapon in left hand" idle stance, your character transitions to this stance instead: Note the open left hand. That's the "weapon in right hand" idle stance, not really one that makes sense for Claws. A similar thing happens after some Claws attacks. Attacks that use animations from before the revamp (Swipe, Spin, Follow Up, Focus, Eviscerate, Confront/Taunt, Shockwave) will leave you in this stance afterwards, which will last until your stance reverts to "out of combat" mode: However, the attacks that use new animations added after the Claws revamp (Strike and Slash) leave you in the "boxer" idle stance after they finish: From there, however, your character quickly transitions to the bugged, "weapon in right hand" stance from before. Ideally the fix for this would be for the automatic stance changes to go back to the "both fists closed, claws pointing slightly up" stance that's fairly iconic to Claws.

I think this could work. Powers have the ability to affect movement caps (Afterburner with the flight speed cap, and Takeoff with the jump speed cap) so if Granite reduced the jump speed and height caps instead of disabling jumping it would get a lot more usable.

Ain't this the truth! This type of set bonus is only available on four IO sets. I'm likely to request it be on every IO set added to the game going forward.

Hm, that's the file for Achilles' Heel IOs, not something my mod should be affecting. From the error message, it looks like whatever mod it's part of, for some reason named the file "E_ICON_AchillesHeel.textureE_ICON_AchillesHeel.textureE_ICON_AchillesHeel.textureE_ICON_AchillesHeel.texture" (basically a copy-paste snafu). You probably could have fixed it by deleting just that file, or renaming it "E_ICON_AchillesHeel.texture".

Yup.

Opening boosters is fun, and I wish there were ways to get them besides deciding to buy yourself one, but I wouldn't want it to be something too common that would devalue them. They'd definitely make fun prizes for community- or Homecoming team-run events.

Lots of self-heal powers boost resistance on top of healing. But the set's not necessarily intended for powers that do all those things, but rather meant to be put into any power that improves survivability, whether that's through defense, resistance, or healing (or regeneration or absorb, which are covered by Healing enhancements). A power that does more than one of those things just gets a bonus. No reason we can't have two.

Personally I think it's the recharge that could stand to be higher. It's quite a challenge to put together sets that enhance so many things well, but it was fun to try. I think there's room in the game for a Universal Mez IO set, too, but no way could you do it without cheating and making all the mez effects count as one IO aspect.

I was thinking about Granite while I made it!

Halloween is on the horizon, and once again my thoughts turn to a possible IO reward for Dr. Kane's House of Horror, following the example of Overwhelming Force being available from the Summer Blockbuster trial. This time, however, I bring something to the table! The Mending Bulwark IO set is the first Universal Protection IO set, and can be slotted into any power that takes healing, defense buff, or resistance enhancements. Details are as follows: Mending Bulwark (Attuned Universal Protection, minimum level 10, all enhancements unique) Enhancements: Resistance / Heal Defense / Resistance / Recharge Defense / Heal / Recharge Resistance / Heal / Recharge Defense / Resistance / Heal / Endurance Defense / 15% Run Speed Buff Set Bonuses: 2: Improves all movement speeds by 9% (Huge) 3: Increases the range of all powers by 7.5% (Small) 4: Increases Smashing/Lethal Defense by 1.25% and Melee Defense by 0.625% (Tiny) 5: Grants you a 4.5% discount to all Endurance costs. (Gargantuan) 6: Grants 4 points of Knockback Protection (Moderate) Six-slotting the full set will result in enhancement values of: Defense: 50.82% (Pre-ED: 52.59%) Resistance: 50.82% (Pre-ED: 52.59%) Healing: 85.7% (Pre-ED: 87.45%) Recharge: 63.6% End Cost: 18.55% The idea here is to create something unique to reward players for running the haunted house trial. One thing I put in there on purpose is that if you split the set into three pairs of IOs across three different powers, you get a very large improvement to your movement speed. Edit: I changed the Defense/Resistance/Heal to Defense/Resistance/Recharge; I felt that the recharge for six-slotting was too low.

That’s the design of the power, it’s -40 resist to Toxic and -20 to everything else.