MistressOhm

Nice setup! I also have a Tartarus, and the only issue I noted with the use of the thumb-rocker and 'space' key is that I have a problem with holding the space key down whilst simultaneously maneuvering the rocker. So I can jump STRAIGHT UP but as soon as I try to maneuver, i'm on the way back down. So instead I'm using four keys on the pad itself as a WASD movement set, which sacrifices those keys for anything else. I'm using the thumbrocker as a target switch (previous/next/closest/defeated) instead of movement. But, can't beat the ergos of the thing, it's really nicely designed.

Why would the usage of "exploit" be in poor form? It's taking advantage of a weakness in a specific powerset, specifically building both targets AND protagonists so that risk is minimized and rewards are maximized. The fact that "Fire Farm" is indeed a thing is indicative that the exploit exists. "Max your Fire resistance and none of the mobs on this map can hurt you." That's the entire mechanic. How is this not an exploit?

Last I checked, the Maintenance Drone replaced the Heal Robot power in the Robotics primary. Triage Beacon is in the Traps Secondary. It's basically a stationary Regen aura, like Tree of Life or those green CoT crystals. Not only different abilities, but different powersets. As a Robots/Traps MM, I can understand how they could be blended together into one build, but unless you want to move a Robots power to the Traps set? It doesn't really jell.

I don't think you're alone. To the contrary, this seems to be quite the vocal portion of the population, altho' I sincerely doubt they have majority status in player numbers. But then again, that's how things get noticed in this day and age. The ones who shout the loudest get addressed, even if the point being shouted about is at the very fringes. Meanwhile, the majority just go along to get along, they keep their heads down, as you pointed out. I just think that the overarching message we ARE seeing from the AFK/Farm/PL groups, is that IF by some mechanic they were all chased off to greener pastures, that Homecoming would collapse into a black hole and vanish. That somehow THEY are the ones keeping this game going, and they state in the same breath that the Devs are 'against them' and that 'there's some conspiracy to neuter them'. Considering all of the ways people enjoy this game, I think that's the height (or the depths) of hubris. ONE powerset gets adjusted, and it's a conspiracy? Well gee, if that particular powerset was the PL flavor of the month, and someone noticed it was out of balance and corrected it, it's not a targeted attack, it's exactly what it says on the tin, an adjustment. The fact that it WAS out of balance in the first place is of course the reason people flocked to it as a farm build... because out of all of the powersets in the game, that one had a hole that you could drive a truck through. Fix that hole, and "OMG FIRE FARMS NERFED!" and out come the pitchforks and torches. It's not that they're clamoring to change other's gameplay, it's that they're saying Listen To Us Or Your Game Goes Away. And I for one really don't like it when not just my gameplay but my entire gaming experience is being held hostage by someone else, regardless of their reasons. I don't want the HC staff to shut farming down, that's a perfectly valid mode of play if you enjoy it. But I'll not be sympathetic to someone stomping their feet and throwing a tantrum because their favorite exploit got closed. And yes, I used the word "Exploit" on purpose.

You illustrated your point with your own reply. You're so convinced that there's Rampant Toxicity Against Farmers, that you've completely discounted Toxicity From Farmers as, you know, another significant source of toxicity in the community. Empath, Heal Thyself.

Krimson, your music is REALLY good. I mean, I dabble about in Mixcraft and Voltage Modular*, but mostly it's rescoring MIDI tracks to different instruments, occasionally some loop compositions that still sound like, you know, loops. Voltage Modular is basically an analog synth builder, sold/distributed by Cherry Audio. It should fit into any DAW as a VST plugin, and if you're into building effects off of analog instruments such as guitars, it can be used as an effects rack just as easily as it can a synth builder. The base version is "free" but you'll end up buying synth modules to plug into the board, that's how they get you. Here's an example, where I took a Tangerine Dream midi I found someplace, and dressed it up using VM instruments. The only thing unchanged on this is the drum track - the original MIDI had a basic piano for the melodic parts. TD-MojavePlan-VoltageModularMix.mp3

Cat, of course.

Going from laptop repairs on Thinkpads and Toshiba Tecras (HAAAATE Tecras!) to working on rack servers was night and day. Of course, there were still design flaws here and there... but rack systems are set up so that a tech can remove and replace pretty much any part without having to disassemble the thing completely. That, and Out-of-Band system monitoring and management. Even if the OS is dead in the water, you can still grab logs, figure out what's broken, and re-image the system remotely once any hardware issues have been corrected.

When your cat is a better farmer than you are.... /s

And all this time I thought "cannot have more than one slotted" meant the entire build, not 'the same power'. WHOOSH! That was the sound of a key concept of set IO's going right over my head all these years.

The PvP community got a huge gift in this last release = the ability to set up bases as PvP arenas. This is something that both the base builder and PvP groups have been asking for, low-key, since base raiding was disabled soon after it was released, back on Live. It was a really fun idea that came out of the gate badly broken, and up until now has been a back-burner "we should get to that" item that finally, someone was able to re-implement. Completely tangential to the current thread, but, I wanted to point out that sometimes the less vocal groups actually get something, rather than have something pulled. We now return you to the 'farm nerfage' rhubarb, already in progress.

That could be said for any of the pool powers. Hasten, for example, used to be THE key power to nearly every build, because of the global recharge buff. Likewise the Leadership pool, because of Tactics as a global +ToHit (and in order to get it you had to grab either Assault or Maneuvers). We won't go into the absolute necessity that was the Fitness pool... now pushed to an Inherent set that everyone can slot as they please, because before that point, if you didn't put picks into Fitness you were gimping yourself. Keep in mind, we're limited to four pool choices. The above was three of them, and if you didn't want Super Speed as your travel power, your travel power was your forth pool pick. The "origin" pools are interesting in that they offer a themed set of powers, attacks, protection/buffs, AND travel, all keyed to an origin. Sorcery is the Magic pool, just as Experimentation is the Science pool. if you select one of these, you have a little Swiss Army knife of tools in one power pool, not spread out among several pools. That's a BIG QoL improvement. I won't go to the point of saying "Wanting" = "Needing", because that's just not the case. We all have needs, things we absolutely cannot do without, whereas what we want is usually over and above what we need. In terms of a build, "need" covers those things that make the build work at its core, without which the build itself would be broken. "Want" is the stuff that one can use within the build to make it better, but without which it still works overall. If in your case, Rune of Protection is a keystone of the build, then yes, the build needs it. If you can get by without it? Then it's a "nice to have" add-on that embellishes the build but does not define it.

And with this, you just stated to everyone that you're willing to throw base principles completely out the window to "win". This is not a philosophical discussion; if you bring up the term "entitlement" and recast it to mean something completely different than the actual definition, no one else will even have a clue what you're referring to. Just, slap in a placeholder word that doesn't have ANY meaning at all, and people will get the idea from context easier than going with some weird form of DoubleSpeak like this. We're done.

That's been changed in the last two releases - getting mezzed no longer kills toggles, just suppresses effects while the mez is active. (Caveat: Toggle Pets such as Voltaic Sentinel do have to be resummoned.) Also, there's a reason nearly every armor powerset includes an anti-mez toggle/click, and nearly every defender primary has an anti-mez ability. For those without, or if you want to get such an ability early, RoP works, but you're going to have to burn a pick and lock one of your pool choices to get it.

Ennh? Entitlement : the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.

What gets me about the people who farm up to 50 + a gazillion Vet levels, and then complain that the "leveling content" is too easy... it was designed for characters NOT jumping headfirst into the Cosmically Awesome end of the pool, right at the start. "I exemplar my 50 to run all of the content." Yeah, that's fine, but you're still carrying huge advantages over people who are actually at that level, who do NOT have all of the accolade powers, who do NOT have Incarnate abilities. To them, this is a challenge, not a cakewalk. As it should be, because those zones were set up, scaled if you will, to match the player-characters, and offer them some hurdles. "but that's BORING! I don't have time to level up the hard way!" Which do you want? Challenging, or fast? Pick one.

"Hey, I'm still getting a lot of XP from doing this AE arc, are you sure the AE stuff is supposed to be less?" "Um...." "Whatever, let's grind this. Momma needs a new 50."

Apparently the AFK PL crowd are dismayed to find that this is not, and was never supposed to be, an AFK game. Who knew?

As an A+ certified tech... unless you're familiar with the brand/model and the layout, this can brick a laptop. There's a process, which includes removing the battery before doing any other work ... just as you'd not mess around with a desktop's connections while the power is still connected. With liquid metal cooling now a thing, jostling the wrong part could result in an internal 'bleed' that fries your components once power is turned on. That said, if you can get to the fans and vents with a small vacuum/brush tool, this is a good way to get the obvious dust and fuzz that can accumulate.

Keep in mind, also, that professors may or may not actually teach classes (or ONLY teach classes). Quite often, they are in charge of research projects, ones that could possibly result in Science or Magic based characters. Whether they're financed by the university endowment, or by external forces (Sponsored By Crey Biotech!) is of course more flavor text for the roleplay. I've a few characters that were selected members of various organizations. Code Three is a PCFD firefighter in a mecha suit, Operative Ramirez is testing a Crey-built energy armor for Freedom Corps, and Dame Demolition WAS a robotics/cybernetics egghead working on reverse-engineering Rikti portal tech for man-portable use, when things went Horribly Wrong. I have cops, ex cops, ex gang members, and yes, at least one Paragon University professor. None of them are in charge of their departments, or even their battalions, though.

To be fair, I don't think it was locked because of anything Snarky said. But, yeah HE STARTED IT!. 😝

So, I'm just logging onto my MM to see how much things have changed (will I need to do a respec?) and I see that my Heal power is now a Summon for a Maintenance Drone pet. I summoned one, to see how it looked, no issues there. However, when I issued a /petcomall dismiss, and the Maintenance Drone blew up, the 'hover drive' sound persisted until the burn patch left by the exploding bot also faded. It's a minor thing, but if the drone itself is gone, there's no need for the hovering sound loop anymore.

The News Literacy Project: https://newslit.org/

So, as a Liberal Arts graduate (talk about a dearth of job opportunities!) I learned something fairly quickly after graduation. A degree in journalism doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a reporter or copy editor. But, the skillset of research and objective writing is incredibly invaluable in jobs where you need to communicate between teams of people. One of my jobs with The Telco was a technical instructor. What this entailed was, reading the documentation from the teams developing new stuff (be it DSL Internet or video streaming applications) and not only understanding as much nuance as I could, but also distilling all of that down into simple, demonstrable concepts that I could teach to a class. It required a 'bridge' from understanding something highly technical to communicating that same thing in layman's terms. The same can be said for journalism - not only do you have the skills to gather as much information about a topic at hand as you can, exploring it from multiple sources and angles, but also presenting it in a way that A Random Stranger could read it, and understand from what you had written, what the issue is. That's a skill that isn't limited to selling newspapers or driving clicks to a website.

The Martial Arts set as a whole is sorely lacking in proper "kiai" technique.