MistressOhm

This SO calls out for a butler uniform and a bowler hat. Press F to pay respects for Herve Villechaise.

For most powers with knock effects, it doesn't change much. The vector is through the caster, to the point of impact, and whatever gets hit gets ragdolled along that line. But, if memory serves, knockback was always in the XY plane only (horizontal), so even if you were overhead and slightly to the side of a spawn, a cone attack's knockback would behave as if you hit them 'on the level' and they'd go flying sideways. Now, your XYZ positioning in space has an effect on what direction spawns get launched. Hover over a group and launch Energy Torrent, and they get slammed DOWN, not so much AWAY. For ranged AOE's (not cones but explosive effects) the vector is calculated from where the AoE goes off, and instead of slamming everything away from the caster (previous model), now they blow targets away from where the grenade or energy ball or bucket of water impacted. Granted most of these have a central target as the aim point, and that spawn might get yeeted in random ways, but theoretically since they're the source point of the knock, as well as affected by it, they should either go straight up, or get knocked down.

I find myself reciting HK-51 in my head when fighting Freaks. "You're already dead, just lie down!" One of the best (and snarkiest) companions in games, that one. (I wonder if EA/Bioware would be upset if I parodied him here.)

Spelunker being a requirement for The Atlas Medallion, I remember people exemplaring down to join teams on that mission, before Ouroboros came around. And it's not an arc (where you'd expect a badge to be waiting at the end), but one mission.

Pretty sure that's the only role of his that actually had any success. Cannon Films... yay. (Altho they did release Buckaroo Banzai...) Sho Kosuge had more star power after that series than Dudikoff did, and he never showed his face thru any of the Ninja films to my recollection.

New Rockstars speculated that the prisoners are building armatures for

The scary part is, two decades ago I'd have dismissed this as pure CT. A decade ago I'd have handwaved it off as possible, but not likely. Now? I think you're spot-on.

If this is correct, then there's an "instance entry" tip that needs to be edited or removed. It specifically states that multiple Sentinels can stack debuffs.

Sounds like you've selected "Combat Only" as your Aura option.

Homecoming's network/webhost provider noted that "bad actor" traffic was increasing, so the HC site admin turned on an option to block it. Honestly, when I first saw these, I though maybe my ISP was to blame, or perhaps the VPN I use or even malware had gotten installed on my system despite my best efforts. So I was checking all manner of things at the client end, none of which made the 'checks' stop. This is probably due to my previous life as tech support - unless there's something posted that says "we have a systems issue" you always start with "find the client issue". Cipher's response (quoted upthread) made me feel a lot less paranoid.

It'd be interesting to have an animation-variant of War Mace that was basically a bowling ball held in one hand. Maybe use some of the Energy Melee animations, only instead of a glowing pom-pom, it was a solid glossy ball (of varying colors and patterns, whatever the Super Lanes pro shop would offer, I suppose.) For Staff fighting, I'd love a 'variable' option, which would mean the 'redraw' of the power would choose from an array of found objects, such as sticks, signposts, brooms, pool cues, etc. Kind of a "grab what's handy" version of the ability, which your character would use until they dropped it. And this wouldn't necessarily be limited to the staff set, but any set that has access to "random environment" bits such as Titan Weapons, War Mace, and so on. An interesting melee powerset in itself, if you think about it - mix various attacks from several weapon sets, in increasing levels of power, and each one of them uses something picked up from the environment, from thrown rocks/pool balls up to grabbing a crossing guard sign and whirling it in a big circle.

As I understand, the ATO just boosts the recharge rate of Opportunity. So it cycles faster and you can spam it on more targets. The only way that you can boost the actual debuff is for multiple Sents to target Opportunity on the same mob, as it does 'stack' with multiple applications. So two Sentinels hitting something with Opportunity would be a 30% -Res, three would lower to 45% -res, and so on. This could be an extremely potent tool against AV's and monsters, but for normal mobs it's likely overkill (besides which, there is no AoE version, which would make a Sentinel OP as all get out, if tagging one mob would debuff an entire spawn to that degree).

Oh HELL no. WTF was the CFO reading unsolicited resume's for, anyway? Talk about a social engineering 'hole' - if the guy couldn't air-gap HIS job, he wasn't qualified for the position!

Apparently you missed the part that says I'm a casual. This means I do not have "a few nights a week" to run on Hami raids. I play when I can, not on a schedule. This means that (aside from running my own TF's at weird hours where I -might- get a team after cooling my heels waiting for half an hour or more) Farming Is All There Is if I want to raise INF to outfit a character. This means that, oh hey! I need a Farm Build too. FML. And because the game economy IS bloated (not as bad as Live but it's pretty bad) 40m is barely enough to get a couple of decent sets even if I go DIY, hunt down recipes, and pool all the salvage on 40+ alts to keep from having to pay for it, again at Market rates. But hey, First World Problems, right? I don't expect you to understand OR empathize, given other posts. >.>

The opposite. I feel as if I -MUST- turn to farming to properly build a character that would be accepted in a task force or trial. I'm a casual, so... those are now off limits also.

Thankfully there's not a lot of 'farm' chat in Everlasting's LFG. Sometimes you see it, but honestly, I see more promos for parties in various bases than I do farms advertising for spots. So no, that's not it. Mostly, it's the economic portion of things. And yes, I know, this isn't Real Life and there's room for me to participate without edging anyone else out, so there is Absolutely No Reason Whatsoever to feel left behind if someone can make billions of inf in an hour whereas I struggle to clear a few hundred thousand. I think my main hangup (and yes it is a hangup!) is that it seems to be exploiting the system, to the point where "everyone does it" and if you don't farm, you're a shitty player for not properly financing yourself.

Storm/Elec can be built into an End Drain/To-Hit Debuff/Def Debuff/Slow/Knockdown tankfender machine. The problem with it (aside from the weird chaos that is Storm Summoning) is that you need a bit of time for all the debuffs to take hold, so the build is susceptible to alpha strikes. Hitting things with the T9 (Thunderous Blast) as an opener would seem to be unwise, as it hits VERY HARD and can lay out an entire spawns worth of minions, but leave the lieuts and bosses still alive (and very pissed off). But, it drains End almost to nil on all but EB's, so any return fire will likely be rather weak. So far the only real challenges I've seen have been other Stormies (the Halloween "Matriarch" EB, Cabal bosses, and the occasional Tsoo sorc that gets lucky with positioning). BUT, there are a lot of mobs that have innate resistance to Repel, so Hurricane won't keep you completely melee-free. For that, Lightning Storm works well as a deterrent because it has a Fear component, things tend to not wander too close to it. Tornado is also good to keep things 'occupied' either with the knockup, the fear, or the Def debuff. It really comes into play when you're up against primarily Ranged opponents, as anything that stays out of reach of Hurricane WILL still be able to hit you with a fair degree of accuracy. For them, Tornado is a very effective means of distraction.

Self only. The Defender ATO's have an Ally AoE version of the same procs (heal and absorb).

Now I want to create a /Regen sentinel. The name "Rez Plz" has a nice ring to it.

That's always a problem when there's a set narrative that the player has to follow, regardless of choices made during the game. With SWTOR, you had two outcomes to each class story, a "Light Side" and a "Dark Side" narrative, reflecting how the character had migrated from "dead center" at the beginning. And yeah, the Smuggler storyline often had them being a complete dumbass, especially once Risha wasn't the one directing things (post Act 1). My fave storyline was the Imperial Agent, very much a 'spy thriller' wherein the railroading wasn't so much limiting the choices the character was given to make, but the chess moves behind the scenes that drove things forward. Secondary was the Bounty Hunter, mainly because it seemed every dialogue choice had a "give no fucks" option that when chosen turned out to be hilariously in-character. It was kind of an underdog/anti-hero "action movie", whereas Smuggler was straight-up "romcom."

Kind of a cornerstone of villainy... do unto others, before they do unto you. Maybe that's why I liked Redside a lot, there was a lot of that going on. Whereas Heroes bank on trust and respect, with villains it's all about what kind of leverage do you have over others to keep them at bay. But yes, it does get pretty formulaic when you ALWAYS get a heel turn in the third act.

@Neiska I don't think you're off base at all. It IS a disparate group (not desperate, yet!) and as such we all have differing ways we prefer to play. And that's what this comes down to, play. This isn't a job. No one is requiring us to log in 8 hours a day, other than perhaps ourselves. If it's not fun, however we each define 'fun', then there's not much reason to engage. As for Dev motivations... I have no idea, we'd need a Dev to weigh in, specifically on that question. We did get a note that said "Hey we figured out the math was wrong on the XP Boosts and fixed it" along with a rather simple explanation as to how it was wrong. The fact that it went unnoticed for such a long time? That probably makes the change sting a bit more, because we'd all gotten used to it being wrong and accepted that as normal. I -try- not to compare myself to others, because let's face it, I'm weird, I know there's not many others that I could even remotely draw comparisons to. (That might be true for a lot of us, but only self-reflection will expose that, it can't be declared from without.) There are times that I get -jealous- of someone multiboxing and running farms to get a 50 in a few hours, whereas it takes me months to get there slogging solo thru the game content. But then I remember, multiboxing requires planning and resources that either I don't have, or don't know how to leverage, so there's more to it than what the results tell you. I admit to getting a large spike of satisfaction when I've automated a job to where what used to take weeks now only takes an hour. The results validate the weeks of time I may have spent working out the process, dodging criticism from others how "it'll never work" or "we don't have time for this, we have things that need doing." So I get it. But, that was to make a job easier and to free up time for more ... productive use. My 'play' isn't in the automation sphere, much. Will these changes chase off the farmers? I doubt it. Yeah, the process isn't -as- efficient as it once was. But it's not completely kiboshed, either. So, there's that. If the Devs decided "in order to save up memory requirements per character, we're shortening the Bio panel to a URL" I'd probably go 'whaa?' because while I understand that server resources management is a thing, there's no plausible explanation why that would be NEEDED with as small of a playerbase as HC has (nevermind how many people are running around with blank bios). It would be ... arbitrary. And maybe that's why the farming people are upset, it feels arbitrary to them. @battlewraith Fair point! I'm still thinking of this as a structured game, with a set of rules. There's something about 'coasting' that bugs me personally, not because it affects me all that directly other than perhaps the economics of the system (a whole new rhubarb to get into!) but because it seems to break or at least bend those rules. I like structure. And structure that gets bypassed is... annoying? I don't know. Maybe I'm borderline OCD that way. But your point stands - it SHOULDN'T be that big of an issue.

So here's my take on the "feelings" posed by a couple of farmers: "I used to be able to make billions just doing the AFK thing, now I can't, and it's not fun anymore". This was never designed to be an AFK game, but there are AFK games out there that you might enjoy, if that's what you like to do. I'm glad this was never a grindfest, and actually catered to casuals since I am one, but at the same time, I don't believe that INF and resources should ever be bestowed in bulk as a participation trophy for showing up. And essentially, that's what AFK farming IS, at the core of things. You log in, enter an instance, set a power to automatic, and do your RL thing while the game throws mobs at your idle character. While that might be a legit strategy, I don't see that it should ever be the predominant way to gain resources - if you're not interactively playing, you shouldn't reap more rewards than those who are interactively playing. Day Jobs are the reward for showing up and simply hanging out in one spot, as specific buffs and minor abilities that are associated with a location. They help with the gameplay but don't break the game. "I farm very little because I accumulated so many resources long ago that, because I don't play much anymore, I don't have tons of toons to outfit and I've got nothing to spend it all on." This is what happens when you farm excessively, exclusively for farming's sake. You got SO much stuff so quickly that you honestly can't use it all, and aside from more farming, you don't really play the rest of the game that much. Face it, you're BORED with the system you yourself set up, and now that the system doesn't flood you with stuff like it did before, the only reason you did something boring is now diminished. It's not the dev's fault you're in this spot, but your method of play was (and is) rather narrowly defined, and that's what got you. While you may feel this was a personal attempt to 'gimp' you, it's simply balance. The same will be said of those folks messing around with wallstreetbets - they're 'gaming' the system, and when the system gets changed to curtail their activity, they'll whine, but then they'll figure something else out. So, figure something else out. "This tastes different and I don't like it anymore." So someone gorged on the buffet in the past, and now the portions are smaller and the cost (sunk Time) higher. If my experience with casino buffets pre and post Covid are any comparison, maybe that buffet line isn't the best choice anymore? The comparison is apt - buffets used to be cheap (and comped to nearly everyone who played) so the quality of the food wasn't always that big a deal. But now they're expensive, and you have to gamble a lot more to earn a comp... so given the choice, I'd rather spend my $20 comp on a pizza made to my specifications, than spending twice that on a few plates of watery wilted salad, crappy orange chicken and bland steamed rice, and a small plate of tiramisu that tastes like it came out of a freezer box with the words "Sara Lee" on it. Likewise, if farming doesn't give a player the endorphin rush that it did, because it's harder, takes longer, or doesn't reward as much, then that player needs to decide if it's worth it to them to continue. As @Doc_Scorpion pointed out above, these quoted feelings are on the table because (and ONLY because) they were brought up as points to the discussion. That makes them fair game. I'm not going to say they aren't valid... but I'm also not going to prop them up if I think they're unreasonable or entitled.

This is one area where SWTOR has a definite edge over CoH, or even WoW. The "Class Story Arcs" that put your character at the beginning of the journey, with three 'chapters' to progress through, and then when you get to the last planet, all of the loose ends get sewn up and you're a Somebody in the Galaxy. Granted, aside from a few flashpoints (what they call Task Forces), you could treat it as a single-player game with 8 branching storylines, in a shared world with other players in. CoH having something like that centered around one's Origin... that'd be awesome. Especially if you could fill in a template early on, kind of like an AE mission builder, that would define an Ally group, a Nemesis group, and perhaps one, two, or three EB's to face along the way. The 'story arc' would plug in these parameters, such that if you were aligned with Group A, and pitted against Group B, A would supply your mission contacts, the Origin would supply the actual text and the maps used, and B would populate the enemies.

Rolled up an Energy Melee/Regen scrapper in a Leprechaun theme. Her name? Beginners Luck