Vanden

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.

This might be an understatement. According to the patch notes, "every AoE power that takes endurance cost enhancements will taunt the enemies it hit." That means Darkest Night should be straight-up a ranged taunt aura for Tankers.

So does Rise of the Phoenix. I think powers (specifically t9s) should have the power to increase defensive caps. For example, Unstoppable could increase the Brute and Tanker resistance cap to 95%, 82.5% for Stalkers and Scrappers. This would mean the powers could still serve a purpose without having to radically redesign them.

When Mk-VI "Victoria" Warwork enemies use their Eye Beams or Placate power, the next melee attack power they use will not sync its effects and animation properly; the damage ticks and the FX happen with a noticeable delay after the animation. I'm pretty sure the game is expecting a weapon draw animation to play because the melee attacks use Dual Blades animations and expect to be in "Dual Blades" weapon mode, but Placate and Eye Beams are not coded to be considered weapon powers. Vickies never play a draw animation, however, so the visuals get out of sync. Observed on both the Lore pet and enemy NPC versions of Vickies, as well as IVy in the final mission for Belladonna Vetrano.

I always thought they should’ve removed the knockback and made it the whole point of the power.

Yeah, IO procs too. 👍

A long, long time ago, before the highly-customizable difficulty settings we had now were added, the size of the team affected the level of enemies. A large enough team would get an extra +1 to the enemies in addition to whatever your difficulty setting was. It's possible that when the current difficulty settings were added, that functionality wasn't removed, but rather tweaked so that it would never actually kick in on any team size settings players had access to. The on-the-fly method we have now is a SCoRE/Homecoming thing; when Paragon/Cryptic coded the team size setting command it wasn't intended as something players would be allowed to set to any arbitrary value they wanted.

Picking a secondary is fairly simple, not too different from picking a primary. After choosing your primary power set and first power, click Next in the lower right corner of the screen. You'll be presented with the list of available secondaries, from which you can choose your desired power set. Something that throws a lot of people is that you don't have to choose a power at this point, you'll automatically take the first power on the list. Once you've clicked on one of the power sets to make your selection, simply hit Next in the lower right again and your secondary set has been selected. Hope that helps!