AlwaysAPrice

Honestly, as a lover of Group Fly, I'd totally welcome this change even if it wouldn't be my ideal approach. The current implementation produces a lot of sometimes quite valid whining that I'm always worried will lead to changes to a power I like just fine the way it is. If it was off by default no new characters would ever have to experience that jarring moment of loss of agency that leads to said kvetching in the first place and these threads would quickly dry up. People who aren't frustrated by the mechanic could go turn it on to continue experiencing it in the wild, and people who would be bothered by it would just never realize it's there in the first place.

It's not that they couldn't make it a proper option, it was just the quickly deployable implementation they had the resources to complete at the time so players could immediately benefit from the additional options they'd figured out how to provide, according to some of the historical notes on the wiki. It still works just fine for its original purpose so sorting that probably remains a pretty low priority feature awaiting the interest of someone patient enough to deal with that particular area of the code. Do think it would be nice if HC made the current implementation less Easter Eggy, dropped a copy of Null somewhere close to the trainers in Atlas & Mercy (or gave its menu to the Field Analysts/Fateweavers to give them something to do), and maybe added a pop-up to the new character process pointing out where it is and what it does, maybe with contact text on the Group Fly/Speed Boost options explaining for new players who haven't encountered those powers yet why the option is provided. (leaving out alignment change on the non co-op zone versions of course or limiting it to just the half-step from that side).

It rarely needs to be, but I think the main purpose of planning a build is to seek consistency in that build's performance. If the recharges of the powers in whatever ideal attack chains I've figured out only line up sustainably while Hasten is toggled in the planner, then to be able to perform that efficiently as regularly as possible I want to be hastened as close to constantly as possible. There's also goals like perma-Dom where I think you don't always quite need perma-Hasten to keep it up but it sure helps, by giving you a larger window between recharge and expiration to refresh Domination in, as more precarious timing on that is easily thrown off by long power animations or recharge debuffing enemies.

This just got me curious so I jumped on a character of mine that I know gets a lot out of Force Feedback but doesn't have the extreme recharge slotting needed for perma-Hasten without it. She's an Ice/SJ tank with 65% global recharge and the Force Feedback proc in Spinning Strike. She's normally pretty close to perma-Hasten because she uses Spiritual, which gives Hasten itself recharge past the ED cap, but I unslotted the Alpha for this test. Without the Alpha, Hasten's recharge upon activation (2 50+5 IOs and 135% global recharge active) was 136 seconds. Jumped in a farm map for a target-rich environment for Spinning Strike and, activating Hasten just before I put Strike on auto, Hasten ended up recharging in a bit under 118 seconds. Before I remembered to unslot the Alpha I tested it against one of the dummies outside the RWZ base, and with just the single target so much less frequent FF procs, I only shaved off about 4 seconds. So if you have the circumstances for a high uptime on Force Feedback, through AoEs and/or longer-recharge powers (I get a lot out of putting it in epic Energy Torrent on other characters), a single one can potentially make up for a 40% shortfall in global recharge, but if it's only going to be in effect a couple times a minute it has much, much less of an impact.

If you have an immediate need to verify who's who on your roster, you can use /getglobalname followed by a character name to check one at a time.

If editing existing macros is the main circumstance you encounter this in, there's a behavior in the bio editor (AE too, I think) that might be related: whenever you enter two consecutive spaces, or while editing allow two existing spaces to touch, one of those spaces will automatically be made non-breaking, recorded as an   while looking like just another space. For example, if I want to edit the sentence "I want to edit the sentence" to say "a" sentence instead, if I place the cursor right at the end of "the" and backspace, it will eventually say "edit sentence" with two spaces for an instant before I hit 'a'. In that instant, it's become "edit  sentence", and will remain "edit a sentence" after I enter the new word. And if I typed multiple words, each time I hit space from that position with a space following, the same thing would happen, leading to invisible character-count-devouring chains like "edit some other sentence". If this is what's happening, it can be avoided by always starting any edits with the cursor at the start of the next word you intend to keep, and might be fixable by just backspacing the affected space so the words on either side touch then re-entering a single space.

Paragon City University, usually shorthanded PCU by NPCs, but it's also sometimes called just Paragon University so Paragon U is probably another common shortening.

I usually buy fresh enhancements for everything, but I've had a couple cases where I did bother to strip things from an old build. When my kat/fire brute reached the end of her empyrean generating lifespan I pulled out most of her gear because I planned to just start the build over, but never got around to playing the new one up, and recently I saved the ATOs and other bits from a sonic/rad corr in the 30s I deleted because the character had never really clicked for me while a more recent ice/rad had. The corr ATOs I ended up turning into scrapper sets for my latest project with converters, since I'd already kitted out the ice/rad before I realized I was never going to bother with the other and decided to scrap it, and the brute gear got claimed piece by piece over years by other characters who either needed them or that I wanted some quick cash on without alting around to e-mail funds, so when I've done this I've never actually ended up using the stripped pieces for the reason I bothered to strip them for. Generally speaking I don't find it to be worth the time and fiddliness of the process of unslotting and transferring enhancements, let alone losing a combo from my roster of options to play with. My normal play and intermittent marketeering keeps my account hovering comfortably around the 3 billion inf while every new full build that holds my interest runs me about 600 million at buy-it-now pricing, and each tends to make most of that back from drops during their incarnate grind.

It's the trade-off for the freedom of movement it provides versus faster modes of movement that have to contend more with the environment. Fly can pretty much always get from A to B in a straight line, everything else has to navigate. Though the new implementation of Afterburner offsets that considerably.

Nature doesn't have the level of debuff of a dark or rad but it's got enough to make a difference, along with healing and +Res to keep you up through the fight, and fire's high damage helps get AVs down to Scourge range pretty fast for a solo player. Early to mid-game AVs are generally not as threatening as the ones faced in say 45 and up content, as they're intended to be dangerous but winnable fights for a team of appropriate level with SOs at best, but they're still hard-hitting giant sacks of HP most non-melee builds can't autopilot through. I haven't tested my own /nature corr against AVs yet but given my experience soloing /Dark: the -ToHit & -Dam from Spore Cloud and -Dam from Enzymes is probably enough to bring the threat of any even-con AV down into that feels-like-an-EB range, then the -Regen and -Res from the same two powers along with Overgrowth's damage boost would help accelerate the melting. I'd say it isn't an over-reaction at all to be impressed if you haven't handled an AV that smoothly with a support build before, but it's also not a surprising outcome for fans of solo corruption, especially if you were exemplared or even just well built out for your level.

If it's very fun to play, I'm probably riding it to T4 in all slots and onward to the Genuine badge, at which point XP usually gets turned off because I'm very mature, though a handful of characters have gotten to keep going if the gag didn't suit their tone or I really wanted the rest of the vet badges on them. If it's good but not thrilling, I'm probably moving on after getting the Incarnate shifts out of the way, and if it's just so-so I probably get weary of it after only a couple vet levels and move on to the next concept that catches my fancy. Accolades and badges are usually super not a concern of mine but the keepers usually end up with a couple of the passives and I'll probably go out of my way for badges that are super appropriate for a character to wear if I notice they exist.

The Devouring Earth showed up after the Rikti War, and there's reference in an arc, The Terra Conspiracy, to a raid on the Paragon Technical Institute when Hamidon was still human made by a character described as a young woman at the time of the arc (which would be 2004-ish since I think it's one that's been in the game from the start) who says she knew him before he was transformed, which suggests to me the transformation is relatively recent. I'm not sure if the Paragon Tech raid is addressed further in any in-game sources (gave up quick on digging through arcs contact by contact on pwiki), but in the story bible PDF that's out there there is some more detail that could help in figuring this out, though nothing in that is canon that wasn't actually used somewhere. In there, that event occurs after the war (the PTI was chosen because other facilities around the world with the equipment he needed to create the Will of the Earth were destroyed by the Rikti) and it mentions that his academic standing with Oxford, where he completed a Ph.D., had "long expired after a decade of working with the radical environmentalist fringe". He's described as a prodigy but there isn't any specific mention that he got an unusually early start on his education, so could have finished at Oxford anywhere in his mid-20s to early 30s, then at least 10 years after that is the Paragon Tech raid where he exposed himself to the Will of the Earth and began his transformation, which was probably in 2003 (between the end of the war and the start of the game). Though he could still be a fair bit older than 35-40 in 2003 if more time transpired between the end of his schooling and that revocation of his credentials, I doubt Primal and Praetorian Hamidon can be hashed out to be the same age. More likely that either the same person was just born at different times on the two Earths, or maybe Praetoria's Hamidon Pasilima Sr. was the mad scientist of the family.

That's actually just the kind of tradeoff I find interesting here. I think I've taken Cardiac once since Alphas were introduced, eventually switching to Musc Radial to buff Stamina along with just more conscious endurance slotting to address the end woes that character was having. But in that example, Assault is still more expensive to run slotless than it would be if they had Cardiac and an End in there. If I had several toggles I didn't necessarily need to slot and could move those slots elsewhere, I could justify taking Cardiac to affect them all, while still paying a cost in giving up the ability to slot them for anything at all. Say I was willing to trade off the slots from all 3 of Assault, Maneuvers, and Tactics and just rely on Cardiac to keep the extra endurance cost in check. Assault may seem like a freebie but Maneuvers and Tactics would still be giving up slots that could improve their performance or hold globals. Yeah. The fact that inherents have and can take more slots is the one part of this that actually makes me leery. I rarely want to give up a slot to Health or Stamina but I know lots of people do rely on them, and all the extra recovery that could be added through Heal & End Mod procs and just plain end mod slotting with some slots moved over there could be a way more significant buff than most set bonuses, for a build that isn't already managing its endurance. IME few builds can't get by on Health & Stam's base slots alone with some effort, but it's still the side of this that creates what I think would be the most common, cookie-cutter use of the feature, when my interest was in adding flexibility.

Ahh, okay. Highlighting the number of base slots that exists misrepresents how many of those can actually end up somewhere else, though. Any power that gets any slotting no longer contributes a slot to the count, and the regular slots per level filling out powers forces the count of actually movable slots down further. It's still high, the lower number of regular slots means there's one more actually movable base slot at 30 than there is at 50, it's just 9, not 17. But again, I've acknowledged from the start that this kind of flexibility wouldn't be well-suited to a levelling overhaul. Appreciate the overall insights and analysis on the topic of early game balance and design though, that is why the post started with a general question about what-if-things-worked-this-way. It's my birthday, don't be snide. Hammering on the concept of balance is fine, but can you at least acknowledge that there is a respect for balance baked into the concept in the removal of a slot from a power that normally comes with one? Whether that balance is adequate for the resulting balance is of course in question, but it's there. Potential is being taken away to make room for it elsewhere. The importance you place on the presence of those slots in the low-level scenario indicates that the ability to place an enhancement in a power has a value that is lost when they are taken away. Considering this in the context of a special endgame respec variant, there are questions of balance inherent to what slots are moved and for what purpose. A character with a complete attack chain from primary powers ditching the slot from the Boxing they don't even put on their tray is just getting a straight benefit. But ditching the slot from a mez toggle or Assault and making do with its normal endurance cost but using it to pick up a recovery bonus, is a more even exchange, while any other bonus means fully accepting that endurance cost as the trade-off for some other buff. Leaving Combat Jumping unslotted to fit an extra slot in Tough for a +3% Def Unique, that could be seen as a good trade for getting a sizable chunk more Def than slotting CJ for Def would, but also less so for the loss of a LotG opportunity. I think describing the potential effects as "disastrous" is hyperbolic. There's two benefits to what is only arguably the most effective use of this, the only-6-slot-approach: 2 more powers one was going to be using anyway now being at six-slot effectiveness instead of at three and one, and 8 set bonuses (1 (2), 1 (3), 2 (4), 2 (5), 2 (6)) or global IOs -- lesser rate ones in the latter case since all the particularly good ones already fit into the sort of builds someone trying to milk this maximally would be starting with. More full strength powers is not at all something to sneeze at, but that top-tier build is already going to have all the powers it needs to keep up whatever cycle its role calls for. So maybe adding in situational extras, except they're not added in they were already going to be part of the build just at lesser effectiveness, in exchange for limiting a third of the build to its most baseline functionality. Of course the min-max 'worst case scenario' does have to be taken into account when determining how well something is balanced, but it's not the whole or only consideration. The game has other kinds of players. I'd wager it's mostly other kinds of players, who are either ignorant of 'the meta' or aware of and choosing to ignore it to make their own gameplay more satisfying and reflective of their creativity. Experienced players among all groups know what powers they can live without enhancing in exchange for making some other aspect of the character perform that little bit better, and being able to use those extraneous slots as a build resource through a special respec with limited availability strikes me as an interesting way to do something new with the process of building, something that's been really rote for a while now. This isn't a campaign, it's enrichment. Had an idea that intrigued me as someone who thinks the art of building is a little stagnant and decided to float it as a rare instance of engaging with a community I mostly just float around the edges of, on the board where literally every topic is just a game design thought experiment up until and unless the HC team decide of their own volition, interest, and capability to do anything with it. Thanks for participating in the shit-shooting thus far, if you're not enjoying it you don't have to.

It came from it just made me laugh. If we'd been going back and forth on the first two points for a couple posts first, it would have fit as a reminder there was more I wasn't addressing, but right off the bat it just read inexplicably impatient so I had some fun with it. If it works as you recall, yeah it'd be more complex to make those slots optional than I'd hope. I mean definitely not. The point is pretty specifically to find out what will they do with the slots that become maneuverable. Most powers are chosen because they are useful and contribute something to your build and playstyle and are worth investing at least one slot, usually more. But some really aren't, due to either power design, conflict with playstyle, powerset/pool structure, or lack of enhancement options that your other build options don't already account for to make the slot unnecessary. And some are actually perfectly sufficient and useful in their particular niche without any enhancement attention at all. I'd be curious to see what powers people decided to sacrifice the slot from most often, it'd provide some interesting insight into how those powers are perceived as performing and invite consideration of whether they can be made stronger contenders for enhancing. If people wanted to use a feature like this to fine-tune their builds with a handful more set bonuses or uniques for a little more of an edge against whatever content they find challenging, more power to them. I think it's a fair trade-off to essentially take on a negative enhancement to do so, deaden a power's potential and limit any performance it could offer to its absolute baseline. All the power picks some ambitious min-maxer might spend just to strip the base slot from would represent powers that could actually do things they aren't taking. Personally, I think more people would just be interested in shelving a pool opener they don't have any gameplay use for to throw an extra slot into a flavor power to meet their concept and gameplay goals. Also, the potential isn't just relevant to setted-out near-gods, ordinary SO/IO builds could use the same process. I'm guessing the extra 7 here is from missing the last line of the OP, as Rudra initially did but caught in an edit. Without inherents that would drop to 10. One could potentially free up additional 1st slots, maybe even more than 17, if you dumped enough normal slots into Brawl, Sprint, Rest, all of Fitness and all Prestige Sprints. Going to just ignore Inherents for now while admitting they're a problem to this idea, if not really that bad of one because that problem is just providing a dumping ground for slots that enables more one-slots to be disposed of so someone trying to prove a point using them could have a ton of crap-ass unslottable powers and a really sweet Brawl, Health, and Sprint. Keeping all slots to chosen powers, the maximum number of sacrificial slots is 10, until they start getting placed. Then it becomes 8. 24 powers that come with one slot each (-1 for dp, bio, and staff), 67 slots rewarded from 3 - 50. 5 slots in each power as long as we have slots gives us 13 6-slotted powers, and a 14th 3-slotted power. 10 1-slotted powers remain. Moving base slots from those, put 3 in the 14th to bring it to 6. Use 5 more to fill the 15th 6-slot, which also stops it from being a 1-slot. There's one 1-slot power left, but it has nowhere to put its slot. And that's only if the builder is pursuing six slots in 15 powers with no other concerns, no powers that will fulfill their purpose with only 2-5 slots, which they probably aren't. Hasten, travel powers, pool toggles, plenty of stuff that is super useful with less than 6 slots, often things that would be wasteful with more than 2 or 3, and every power that has more than one slot is a power that by definition didn't lose its base slot. My hunch is that even someone trying to use this to milk out as much extra performance for performance's sake is only going to shuffle around maybe 3-5 slots, at some noticable cost. Definitely enough to have some potential to be significant to some build goal that really wants to eke out that little bit more for a couple specific stats, depending on how those slots are added to the mix, but still likely to be dwarfed in overall impact by their Incarnate choices.