aethereal

That works.

Or you're looking at a different shard.

There's a costume suggestions thread in the Suggestions forum -- it doesn't seem likely that devs are going to add costumes that are completely unrelated to anything they've made available here during the final stages of the public beta.

You attributed that quote to me, but it's not me, it's, uh, Zepp I think. And: yes. Realistically, the people who are at risk of losing names under the current proposition is not "people who have one or two beloved non-traditional characters." They can advance those characters to level 6 with ease, or just log into them once a month (and emergencies where you actually can't log in to a computer once in 30 days are rare as hen's teeth). It's the people who have 20 or 30 such characters, for whom it would legitimately be a slog to log into them once every 30 days -- not a huge problem, but a tiresome chore -- and where they'd have to devote quite a few hours to get them all to level 6. And that's as it should be. Because that's name squatting. Having a whole stable of characters who you don't play but sit on should be a pain in the ass, to discourage people from doing it.

I dunno! Maybe not that much. I grow bored of non-RP toons, so. But if I had a character who was literally just a mule for item storage or an interface to the AH, I don't think I'd care if his name got changed.

Exactly how urgent is it for your marketing toon to have a highly desirable name?

CoD doesn't show the NearGround tag for individual power effects (as far as I can see), so I can't check that for recent versions, but looking back at the old JSON files, it seems to me that immobilize protection is, like the knock protection, flagged NearGround. That's also what the power description implies. So, with fair confidence, I think: Only when near the ground: knock protection, immobilize protection Regardless of whether near ground: Resistance to energy, negative energy, and endurance drain.

I suggest getting attuned sets for low-level characters, not either SOs or common IOs. It doesn't really cost much money (or rather, it does, but you can resell them once you no longer need them and the total difference after you've resold them is a pretty small amount of money), and it makes a drastic difference in how your character plays in the 20s and 30s. People have really convinced themselves otherwise to their detriment. Even just getting uncommon yellow sets really helps your enhancement values and the set bonuses add up to a lot of QoL even if they don't bring you to unkillable god. If you're playing through the levelling process at a relatively sedate pace, it's absolutely worth it.

So, uh, we lost Diamond Cut and added Mystic? Here's what Mystic looks like for anyone wondering.

Couldn't you just delete the character and recreate it? I mean, you'd have to stow any enhancements somewhere, but otherwise, why do you need a respec when you can just create the character at level 50? You can just create a brand new TW spec it, transfer enhancements from the old one, then delete the old one and rename the new one. EDIT: I guess this way you'd have to use unslotters, which is a mild expense.

So, basically: If you have 0% resist, then you get hit by a 20% resist debuff (a resistable one), then your resistance drops to -20%. If someone hits you with a 100 damage attack, you take 120 damage, or 20% more than you would've without the resist debuff. If you have a 50% resist, then you get hit by a 20% resist debuff (a resistable one), then because resistance resists resist debuffs, you resist half the debuff (so it's 10%) and your resistance drops to 40%. If someone hits you with a 100 damage attack, you take 60 damage, or 20% more than you would've without the resistance debuff. If you have a 75% resist, then you get hit by a 20% resist debuff (a resistable one), then because resistance resists resist debuffs, you resist three quarters of the debuff (so it's 5%) and your resistance drops to 70%. If someone hits you with a 100 damage attack, you take 30 damage, or 20% more than you would've without the resistance debuff. So basically, if you hit someone with a 20% resist debuff, then no matter what their starting resistance is, they take 20% more damage after the debuff than before. I think that's nice. In contrast, defense debuffs: If you have 0% defense, then you get hit by a 20% defense debuff, then your defense drops to -20%, so an enemy who ordinarily hits you 50% of the time hits you 70% of the time, so you take 40% more damage than you would've without the defense debuff. If you have 20% defense, then you get hit by a 20% defense debuff, then your defense drops to 0%, so an enemy who would hit 50% of the time unaided, and who hits you 30% of the time with your normal defense, is back to 50%, so you take 67% more damage than you would've without the defense debuff. If you have 40% defense, then you get hit by a 20% defense debuff, then youor defense drops to 20%, and you take 200% more damage than you would've without the defense debuff. This is why DDR is such a big deal, and in my opinion it kinda sucks as a game dynamic. It makes a really sharp line between "extremely high levels of mitigation" and "extremely low levels of mitigation." So I like the resistance dynamic better. Unresistable resistance debuffs work like defense debuffs. I'm still not sure if the purple patch is technically "resistance" and whether unresistable means "ignores the purple patch" or not.

Does unresistable even affect purple patch reductions in values? I'm not clear. Anyway, unresistable on resistance debuffs creates the whole Defense Debuff dynamic where resist debuffs become massively better on high-resistance characters than low-resistance characters, which is not, I think, a great dynamic.

Some notes on resistance debuffs: Remember that resistance debuffs are affected by the Purple Patch! If a team is at +4, as lots of teams are, what does that mean? If the team level and your level are both 50 and the team is +4, then enemies are 54, and so they're either +4 to you or +3 to you if you have a level shift. If the team level is below 50 and you're at or above the team level, and the team is +4, then enemies are a 50/50 mix of +4 and +5 to you (+3 and +4 if you have a level shift) If the team is below 50 and you're below the team level, and the team is +4, then enemies are a 50/50 mix of +5 and +6 to you (impossible for you to have a level shift in this situation) Debuff modifiers if enemies are: +3 to you: .65 +4 to you: .48 +5 to you: .3 +6 to you: .15 Corruptors get a 15% debuff per attack (on Live, split into pieces on beta). If you have a .65 modifier to that, it's roughly 10%. If you have a .48 modifier to that, it's roughly 7.5%. If you have a .3 modifier, it's roughly 5%, and .15 is roughly 2.5%. Yeah, you'll do better than that against +2 and lower opponents, but... does a large team really need help against +2 and lower opponents? Even AVs? Unfortunately, like all debuffs, there's sort of a catch 22 where the things that you most need the help against are least affected by the debuffs. Like, the 10% debuff per attack that a Corruptor with sonic blast gets against a +3 opponent (ie, a level 50 team when you're level 50 and you also have a level shift) is pretty substantial. But then we're talking a large team of incarnates against an AV. That's usually zerg-o'clock. Are there teams where you're like, "Some of this team is underleveled and we're fighting someone tough and I'd really like the help?" Sure. But then you're probably at 7.5% or 5% per attack, and it's honestly not a ton. So, TL;DR: Test it out, don't just rely on your intuition about resistance debuffs.

Guys, maybe consider that it's not supposed to be super easy for you to continue to squat on 200 names of characters that you rarely play and have never frequently played.

They stack.

I think you're under a misapprehension about how the Sentinel inherent works. So a Sonic sentinel under the current Beta rules has access to four separate sources of resistance debuff that can be (in some cases) triggered by their T1 and T2 powers. The Sentinel Opportunity inherent applies a -5% resistance debuff to any hostile target hit by any power from the Sentinel, including but not limited to the T1 and T2. This does not stack from your own powers -- so once you hit with any power, you apply this and further power hits do not stack any more resistance from this source. Both the T1 and the T2, as well as most other sonic attack powers, apply the "Short" debuff, which is -5.76% resistance. This does not stack with multiple applications from the same caster -- so once one of your powers applies this, it won't be applied again. Both the T1 and the T2, and not the other sonic attack powers, apply the "Lingering" debuff, which is -3.84% resistance. This does not stack with multiple applications from the same caster -- so once one of yoru powers applies this, it won't be applied again. If your rage/opportunity meter is >90% full then you'll get red and blue rings around your T1 and T2, then either the T1 or the T2 will apply a -20% resistance debuff that's generally considered part of the Sentinel inherent, though actually it's coded onto the T1 and T2 powers themselves. This is called the "Vulnerability" debuff. This does not stack with anything, including other casters' use of Vulnerability. There shouldn't really be any opportunity for you to use both the T1 and the T2 vulnerability (using one puts you in lockout and removes the chance to use the other), but if you somehow did, they wouldn't stack. All of these four sources of -resist stack with each other, so you can potentially put a total of -34% and change resistance on a target with one hit of the T1 or T2 power (but only if your rage/opportunity meter is > 90%). The only change here in the beta is changing the former -9.6% or whatever it exactly was debuff to two pieces and how they stack with other powers. The Sentinel inherent is unchanged and independent of the Sonic Attack specific changes.

Huh? For me, the first color selection changes the color of the energy. (The second color appears to do nothing).

You can test it by getting the power analyzer and going and shooting something (a pylon is the trad choice) and analyzing its resistance. But I honestly don't think you need to. It would have been a huge amount of work for them to make the Sentinel inherent debuffs not stack with the Sonic debuffs. There's pretty much no chance they accidentally screwed that up.

I assume you mean the sentinel inherent, which is -5% normally and an additional -20% when opportunity is activated. That stacks with all the sonic attack resistance debuffs.

Here's what I'd do with Sonic Attack: 1. Change the non-stacking/stacking split from 12/8 to 10/10. Justification: This doesn't really matter. Nobody is actually going to notice the difference in stacking an additional 2% resist debuff per power. But it will mean that three power applications can get to -40% resist debuff and despite the fact that 36% and 40% are essentially identical, it will make people feel better. 2. Give Shriek and Scream separate debuffs. Justification: This will make the early game flow more smoothly, especially for Defenders who have to wait a long time to get Screech and Siren's Song. People who prioritize taking both T1 and T2s for Blasters or Sentinels because of their inherents won't feel as victimized (and given Blaster and Sentinel debuff values, the additional resist is negligible). If someone on a Defender at level 50 really wants to take a single-target power because it allows them to stack 10% more resist debuff, I mean... Cool, bro, you do you. 3. I dunno, maybe give Sentinels a little something more, not sure, Sentinels are a mess anyway. 4. SHIP IT. The basic idea of the changes is great. People aren't spending enough time on the big cast time reductions of Howl and Shout.

Uh. Single Shot and Pistols provide no resistance debuffing, though. I mean, maybe so, but the set is still not clearly better after the patch than before, on Sentinels.

I don't know why we're comparing Piercing Rounds and Piercing Beam to Shriek. Isn't Screech a better comparison? Screech looks pretty favorable in comparison to either, to me. I'm not convinced that Sentinels got a buff. They already had the highly damaging Screech, which I think is one of the big benefits to the other three ranged attack classes, and they got the target cap reductions. For them, it seems like more of a wash.

I'm asking for it! I like Sonic thematically, but I don't want to make characters focused solely on SBB and shaving seconds off AV fights in large teams. Especially since it's still fine at those things. Yes, not as good as it was, but it still puts out quite a bit of -res.

Scorpion shield is, uh, very obviously for S/L and E defense. If you have X sets that get you about 30% S/L defense, and Scorpion Shield to get you to 45% defense, then if you can get equally powerful sets that give ranged defense, you'll need probably another three to six sets to get you to ranged defense softcap instead. It's certainly possible to softcap ranged defense as a squishy, but it takes much more build room than does softcapping S/L defense, assuming that you were willing to get Scorpion Shield with your ancillary pick.

There's no equivalent of Scorpion Shield for ranged defense.