Vanden

This is an idea that I'm surprised hasn't been floated more often. It is more punitive than this suggestion, though; the HP increase between tiers is comparable to this suggestion at around 6 or 7 team members, but there's no scaling for smaller teams besides there being fewer mobs, all ATs and powers are equally affected rather than having the various provisos this idea has, and naturally with higher ranks the enemies' powers get stronger and more accurate, instead of strictly being an enemy survivability buff. There's also the issue of control effects; with every Lt becoming a boss and every Boss becoming an EB, control effects become severely weaker, to a much greater degree than anything else. That is, in fact, the exact issue that lead to me thinking up this idea as an alternative.

*shrug* Bosses and Archvillains are forced on in TFs, I don't see this as much different. TFs are supposed to be tougher than normal missions.

The lightning is the main effect.

They can't be slotted for a reason. Because of the wonky enhancement system, pet powers only take enhancement from IO sets that match exactly. So, for example, if you put an Accuracy/Slow IO in Storm Cell, the lightning strike procs would NOT receive accuracy bonuses from that enhancement, because the lightning strike powers don't have a slow effect. Maybe that weirdness will get addressed some day, but until then, not allowing those sets is preventing players from falling into some very unintuitive pitfalls.

Sometimes you get an idea in your head, and you just gotta get it out there! So here's the rub: enemies are dying too fast. I don't mean too fast to challenge players, I mean too fast for it to feel like you're really playing the game. In the current high-level team environment, any power that takes longer than 2 seconds to use will probably just hit a corpse on a team. Two seconds is NOT a long time, yet in a typical high-level team it's too slow to be competitive. In an attempt to counteract this, I'm proposing an additional difficulty setting that should both bring some lost challenge back, while simultaneously increasing the value of certain archetypes in teams. Details are as follows: This new setting toggles On/Off independently of other settings, just like the Bosses/No Bosses and Archvillains/Elite Bosses options Every additional teammate or Team Size setting above x1 reduces the damage of AoE attacks by roughly 8.6%. With a full team or at x8, AoE attacks do 40% of normal damage. Single-target attacks do normal damage. AoE attacks that require a target do full damage to the primary target. This setting is forced on for most TFs, with the exception of issue 0-2 TFs, because of their length. This setting is forced off for League content. Certain archetypes have partial exceptions to the AoE damage reduction: Brutes, Defenders, Kheldians, and VEATs only suffer 2/3rds the damage reduction for their AoEs. At x8, their AoEs do 60% damage. Scrappers, Stalkers, Corruptors, and VEATs suffer no reduction to the critical hit portion of their damage from AoE attacks. Yes, there would be increased XP/Inf/Drop rewards to compensate for the overall slower clear speeds. Under this new difficulty setting, single-target specialists have more value in teams, as do any sets that shine in longer engagements. It also restores to Brutes some of the luster they lost with the Tanker AoE buffs, and gives extra incentive to invite some lower-damage ATs to a team.

I got the ticket: disable travel and stealth powers in the mission. That'll fix things!

Is it? How many invis powers actually get that theme?

The problem with making a weapon secondary for Doms is primarily technical limitations. There’s only 4 costume slots for weapons: 2 for right-hand weapons, and 2 for left hand weapons. Mace Mastery basically has one of the right-hand slots permanently reserved, since any character could need it. The only combo melee/range weapons I can think of that would really work is bow/katana, since they could use the 2 left hand slots. Otherwise, I can’t think of any options that would have the needed animations for ranged and melee options that assault sets require.

You'll take Boggle, and you're gonna like it!

You'd be right!

I don't think wiping out handfuls of harmless grey mobs is something that's really badgeworthy, myself.

The ability to play animations starting at later frames, and at varied speeds When creating a demo files, you can cut off any animation by interrupting it with another animation, so it's possible to skip any portion of the end of an animation. But there's no way to skip any of the start of the animation by beginning it at a later frame. It would also be very convenient to be able to make an animation play at a varied speed. Ideally this feature could be used by just typing some extra digits on a line in the demo file where you put an instruction for an NPC to do an animation. As an example: 0 1 MOV SMASHCAST 30 1.5 This line would make it so that 0 milliseconds after the last instruction, entity 1 plays the SMASHCAST animation, starting at frame 30, at 1.5x the default speed. This would really open up a lot of possibilities for creating interesting displays. No more SKYFILE spam At some point, demo files started getting recorded with dozens to hundreds of lines with a SKYFILE command. No one seems to know what this command actually does, demos run fine and don't look weird without them, and all they do is bloat the files and complicate the process of figuring out various timings between instructions. If they're not important, could they please just stop being recorded? Record hit animations again For some reason demos stopped recording animations that NPCs and players do if they're hit with attacks. This obviously makes it much more difficult to find out the animation names of those animations. Whatever bug is stopping those animations from being recorded, could it be investigated?

Ooh, someone didn't look closely in the tailor 😇

Can you clarify this bolded part here? I'm having trouble understanding what you mean. You have to use attacks to clear any sort of encounter, so I'm not sure why you seem to say that needing to use further attacks to get Storm Cell procs is having a negative effect on the experience of the set for you.

The badge is for City of Heroes' anniversary, not Paragon City's.

There is a "one-handed weapon drawn from the hip" animation that would work - it's mostly used by low-level minions to draw knives and daggers. Assuming it works on both Female and Huge models in addition to Male, and a flying version exists, it would work for Broadsword et. al. But just having the animation is only a small piece of the work that would have to be done.

It's "possible" insofar as appropriate animations exist and could even be stitched together to create the look, but still an enormous amount of work to implement.

Unkindness doesn't summon crows, though, it summons ravens. An unkindness is a group of ravens.

It's not really a good substitute, since Aim and equivalents are on a 90s recharge, while Beanbag is on a 20s (now 10s) cooldown. It's a massive reduction in Beanbag's already meager CC potential.

I meant FX-wise. The NPCs' Impervium Armor is a passive, so no FX are tied to it.

So, regarding the idea itself, I don't think it's a bad idea, but I do think there's a whole lot less to work with than, say, IDF/Praetorian Police. Vanguard has a decent variety of attacks, true, but they have nothing that could be an armor toggle for the squishy classes, nothing that would make for good control powers. They have a heavy reliance on weapons, all of which are already available as costume options for the appropriate power sets. In particular, I don't think their signature Claws powers would be feasible for an APP, because I asked Cobalt Arachne (the dev in charge of all the weapon costume stuff) about the possibility of putting multiple weapon costume slot unlocks in an APP, and his answer was, uh, not encouraging. You could make them non-customizable, but that's obviously not ideal. So while I think conceptually, Vanguard is a good fit for a Patron pool, there's just an enormous amount work that would have to be done in order to make it actually happen.

It would've been a mechanically identical pet.

Because we don't want something different. We want Aim. That's literally the reason this post was made.

Mayor Morales has lost sight of what this city and its people need! The citizens and heroes of Paragon City need to see less of him, not more! It’s time for a candidate with a lifetime of public service and serving the needs of all of Paragon’s citizens, not just its wealthiest. Michael White for mayor!