Sunsette

lol, being polite, are we? 🙂 I feel like "Praetoria is ruined" is a bit too much of a running theme -- the underground runs parallel to the above for all three of the base Prae zones (and Neutropolis already gets a bit grimy). First Ward is a wreck outright and Night Ward nosedives it. Seeing the dawn afterwards would be, well, neat. In my opinion, anyway.

I enjoy Opportunity conceptually; I like putting those big crosshairs on a target. In general, Sent has the least boring version of multiple armor powersets, which is nice. I'm as down as anyone about the Sent right now, but it feels a bit rude to go into someone's thread asking for positivity and be negative... can just not respond (or participate in one of the many many other discussions we have about this elsewhere) if you want to.

I wasn't really thinking about polymorph, etc. but stuns/slows/roots, which do fit the fast pace of high key mythic+ much better (though I do think it could be slowed down a tad; I know where you're coming from).

I would love to have a third version of the zone called Dawn Ward where you turn the Midnight Mansion and the Night Ward into a gleaming magical city for Praetorian refugees but have to face off against Hamidon bleeding into the Twilight Paths. Use that blinding sun screenspace effect with a tone down for an entire zone.

I mean, criticism and kindness don't have to be at odds. We're not paying customers with a right to expect anything in particular, just the ability to leave if we're unhappy and communicate kindly otherwise. I left for two years and now that I'm back I'm focused on blaster. As long as you're not leveling gold side, Sent is a fine and popular solo experience; still better than many other ATs. Inaccurate descriptions in many cases goes back to the original blast sets -- power blast used to have a different range -- and isn't unique to the Sent. This also happens with some blasts adapted to Dominator Assault. The AT stumbles hard for power players, but those are only a fraction of the playerbase. Further, the immediate reaction to many on the creation of the Sentinel was that the very idea was inherently broken. The HC team appears to have calculated that the best decision to take with the Sentinel is to be very slow since it's mostly working, and make sure the ATs it conceptually competes with are fine first, to allay concerns of broken. I disagree with that sentiment, especially since I think it harms attracting people back to the game to find out there's not a lot new, but I don't think it's wise or proper to go from "I disagree" to "idiotic" under those circumstances

Perhaps we should make a new project thread to hash out a dream list of corrections, focusing on the powersets we are personally most experienced and invested in? Then forward it to the suggestions forum.

Fire EM should work fine for you. EM's T1 is a great "get out of my face" button, Build Up is always wonderful, Power Boost is a skip with fire imo, Boost Range can be useful. If what you want is a secondary that stays out of your way and gives you a lot of freedom to be at maximum range, EM is arguably the best at that. Devices and Tac Arrow are more active ranged secondaries but require more power choices.

I get where you're coming from, and I mostly agree with the sentiment, but I'd like to remain more... careful? in how we criticize the changes, because -- again, they're unpaid volunteers who have a lot on their plate and it can get tough to read the negativity over and over. I'd prefer they feel comfortable on this forum so that we can have an open dialogue as opposed to a repeat of the way Super Strength change discussion went down.

220ish was what I got with NRG/NRG/Fire i believe. If I dropped perma hasten and optimized just for pylon I could probably get that a bit higher but that gets into the realm of, well, optimizing for pylon rather than general high performance, which I think costs too much on a Sent who doesn't have money for multiple billionaire builds. And tbh I'm not sure why exactly you *wouldn't* run 5-6 piece sets in most powers for a general purposes build; proccing out an epic pool when you're sure that you have everything online makes sense. You're talking either a lot of investment or hyper specialization for max level if you're running multiple frankenslot attacks since they tend to be terrible on endurance. These aren't the level of tweaks other ATs need to follow, so i don't think that's the common player experience.

Tangentially, I've never liked the Well of the Furies for either its original Canon purpose or its later purpose and it drives me batty every time we see Canon legacy heroes with backstory that seems like it should overlap into that period. I feel mixed about the saving throw made there in that one short story when Mender Silos says "by the way everything about the Statesman/Recluse statement isn't quite correct" for similar reasons.

I mean, part of that is mechanics that absolutely can't translate to real life, and we're working with relatively small groups here. I would be *interested* to see what an economist says but to me the biggest thing I would take note of is just that it's healthier and more fun economy to participate in than most MMOs because it doesn't have the 'permanently bind' mechanic in overuse.

Kang is, notably, one of the most informed praetorians who isn't high level government. I'm not saying these are going to be large and powerful countries; I've been repeatedly referring to small, scattered settlements. I'm thinking villages, mostly, much as what's left of Praetoria itself ends up. Not a huge nation like Brazil, India, Australia; frankly, I suspect Monaco would be too large. But while Praetoria is functionally an undisputed hegemon, too much of the information we have leaves room for doubt on their "100% of humanity" status by being either incomplete or obviously intended as unreliable narrator.

...OK, so that's not at all actually what I was saying. I'm saying that if the Devouring Earth hasn't managed to actually cleanse Praetoria of all people even after he's gone full genocide all over again, I see no reason to think they were so perfectly efficient *before* the fall of Praetoria that no one could have survived while he had a deal running with Cole. I highly doubt that the Devouring Earth was going "oh! These people don't have the Gold Star of Praetoria! Kill them! But spare those other dudes, they have gold." considering that they apparently ignored the affront of the sonic fencing for decades. There was just a straight-up lower level of DE activity period at that point. My concept is in reference to the idea of a survivor of the Praetorian dimension who was nevertheless not a member of the Empire.

To go back to the topic question (since I think we're kinda discussing the opposite with the mez) -- meta-narrative mechanics: FATE Points, Force Points, Destiny Points, Action Points, Hero Points, etc. do not translate well to MMOs at all.

I'm not the expert here -- I won't presume that I can (or should) convince anyone of this who is. If that big rerelease done with a relatively small art crew is insufficient, then I presume there's a good reason. But I figured it was enough of a splash in the scene to make it worth checking if it had altered that opinion any... because goodness there are some pixelated things in the costume creator! Old faces especially.

@Yomo Kimyata I'm not doubting you but I don't understand how posting my salvage at higher prices would have forestalled the price run. Like, best case scenario, wouldn't posting it at higher values either... Still not be as high as the bids, so gets swallowed up anyway Be too high for existing bids, causing people to bid higher? 🤔😵

it doesn't seem that odd to me. I think it was a well-intentioned attempt to backport some of the newer design conceits found in those later sets without making the older sets unrecognizable. Unfortunately, I don't think it succeeded and it would have been better to actually engineer a new primary type; energy patrol, etc. For whatever reason, a lot of the ingenuity that was clearly present for the redesign of several defensive sets wasn't quite there for the offensive ones (maybe the designer had a lot more familiarity with tankers and brutes than blasters).

Most of the sets have descriptions that are extremely off, yeah. You need Mids to easily realize that power push is the best attack in Energy Blast, and it's still a like 16 Magnitude KB. The snipe replacements are mostly mediocre except for frankenslotting, and there's lots of these attempts to combine CC and DPS in the oldest blast sets as part of the Sent attack chain that just doesn't seem as well thought out as most homecoming changes. The later sets like DP, BR, and Water don't have these strange combinations.

This is an old topic, but I thought I'd bump this to see what opinions were on this given the recent rerelease of Mass Effect (in large part based on the strength of AI upscaling with hand touches afterwards). The process has come a long way in a short time.

I doubt it's flourishing or even much of a life, but I doubt Hamidon was ruthlessly efficient enough to wipe out literally everyone if the survivors of Praetoria are managing a living after Tyrant nuked the place to death. Scattered settlement survivors, etc. Interrogator Kang also makes some oblique mentions of countries outside of Praetoria. He *could* be referring to conquered areas that aren't well-administrated but the lack of easy familiarity he displays makes that seem unlikely, to me.

Non-binary state mezzing would require a lot more careful balancing and tweaking of numbers than we ever got, since 'death spirals' are a known issue in games that have heavy debuffing. But it would be nice.

Can see why. It's a semi-active skip-nothing Rad-like secondary except that its clicky effort is put towards making your survivability even better. This avoids the "Sentinel feels like a worse blaster" problem by making it so that there's fun things associated with the secondary rather than feeling like you have to take 4 toggle powers to equal Blaster Scorp Shield; however, it exacerbates the problem on the front that with DDR or much higher non-cold base resists or higher Sent Max HP, it doesn't look like it really reach "I laugh in the face of death" except for its ~40% uptime on the defensive T9.

It still is, it's just not a role-per-se, which tbh I think has largely been for the best. CC is *incredibly* important in Mythic Dungeons in WoW, for example, but DPS and Heals both are likely to carry CC while tanks basically never do or have a very limited capacity for them. Generally while control is incredibly important for dealing with groups (that is to say, crowds), sooner or later virtually all games have hard bosses that include a patchwerk phase -- go ham DPS as hard as you can without anyone dying. And controllers in CoX have always been in an awkward situation with those in the form of AVs and giant monsters.

That brings up an amusing note: I've been throwing around ideas for a Praetorian character that is not from the Empire and I'm trying to think how they would refer to their home dimension. If you're outside of Cole's regime entirely (rather than within it but resisting) you probably object to that being the name for your whole world.

Price spike I would bet is related to the fact that Homecoming's server functions have been slowed down indefinitely until the hosting is fixed, meaning that already low priority functions like cross-server salvage retrieval in AH buckets is extremely low, so people drive up the price for instant purchase on same-server. I dumped out 5 characters' worth of yellow salvage at 1 inf to try to reset the market and ended up with a few extra million instantly