aethereal

I do think that making T1/T2 not share a buff is worthwhile. Powerhouse stated something like "people felt like then they needed to get every power." Well, I mean, that's their neurosis, man. We don't have to cater to them any more than we have to cater to the people who want all debuff, no damage at all. For everyone else, their early leveling experience is better.

Sometimes... but not very often.

Why Doesn't Everyone Just Use Fire Blast? I mean, it's a real question, to be sure. It's one of the reasons why I'm not on board with all the people who are like team "we should fully divorce mechanics and aesthetics, so that I can make a 'Banshee' that shoots sonic waves from her mouth which is Fire Blast." Howl giving -20% res to 10 targets at the start of each spawn seems like... not the biggest deal in the world, but a notable advantage. But new Sonic Blast still has it. Putting accumulated -res on a hard target has a niche, it's just not a big enough niche to justify the entire rest of the set sucking.

It won't be that hard to find a situation where it's a nerf to a teamed character: just go find an AV or GM, especially at +0. It'll survive long enough for the debuffs to actually matter, and the debuffs do go higher on live. And there's no way that the difference between one character's low-end blast set and mid-end blast set is worth an extra, I dunno, 20% or 40% damage for a whole team. But is that important? AV and GM fights are a very small part of the game, and on a large-ish teams are very foregone conclusions. Is chopping ten or twenty seconds off a fight that happens once or twice in a TF, and 0.1 times in an average arc, a role for an entire powerset? Is the new sonic blast actually any worse in non-AV/GM fights even on a full team? I'm highly dubious. In a classic large-team zerg attack, what debuffs was a Defender applying? One Howl to give everything -20% -- which you still do. Then maybe a couple of ST attacks on a boss, assuming you don't have something better to do from your, you know, primary powerset. But now your ST attacks are better and faster, and that partially compensates for the lower stacking. Is there anything observably slower here? People just tend to overestimate how good -res debuffs are. Ask @Sovera.

Teams are heavily all about AoE. If you're going around trying to stack ST res debuffs on things on a team, man, everything's already dead. Even if you were at Defender levels, if you're dealing with +4 opponents they're taking half of your -res. Two hits would put around a 20% debuff on something before, now it's a 14% debuff. Is the 6% debuff actually that big a deal? Let me submit that it's not. Like, I get it, there were a few situations where it was really nice to attack a single hard target and stack up major resistance debuffs. But they were a small minority of the game -- mostly, what Sonic was was a low-performing set that paid for resistance debuffs by having bottom-of-the-barrel performance in both ST and AoE. In solo play, you spent a whole bunch of time stacking up -res just to get yourself back to par. In team situations, most of the time, by the time your second or third debuff hit something, it was already long dead.

Two powers went from "basically not damaging" to "solid damage output." Three powers got major cast time reductions (and two got minor cast time reductions), which also has a big effect on damage. Sonic had a big problem previously that it only had the three standard ST blasts and one of those blasts had an incredibly slow cast time. Now it has four ST attacks, and they cast faster than before. That's much better ST damage output. Having the three cones now all do solid damage and cast time reductions on them as well makes for a big damage output improvement across the set.

Yep. Katana sheathes at the hip. Ninja Blade, despite being very similar to Katana, is not Katana. Per the patch notes, Sentinel ninja tool sheathes at the back, like Ninja Blade.

Could we get Carnival of Shadows Rapier ported to Dual Blades as well? I know that canonically, the Carnival of Shadows fencers use only one blade, but given that a PC wielding the CoS rapier is going to be a special snowflake of some kind anyway, it doesn't seem crazy to make a dual-wielding option. Normal rapiers are already in DB, so obviously the powerset's animations and everything work with them.

They clip right through. Note that katanas sheath at the hip, not the back, and at least on a lot of wings won't clip. Everything else sheaths on the back, though, I think.

Yeah, thanks, I have been, you know, alive for the last 30 years. But there are plenty of reasons why people might want a small costume without it being chibi, or without it being so aggressively chibi.

I get that. It'd be more appealing to me as a super expensive item if the head were more proportional.

The super-big head on the mini costume is a little egregious, any way we could tune it down a touch?

Ooops, sorry.

At least in the character creator itself, in Titan Weapons (Scrapper, if that makes a difference, female body) the VK-99 Event Horizon and the PX-17N Supernova have their particle effects still turned ON while sheathed. So does the Plasma Sword. So does the Concrete Mallet.

That's not true. DoT secondary effects, as from Savage Melee or Fiery Melee, get nothing from crits. DoTs that are part of the main effect of the power typically have crits that sum up the total damage from the DoT and do it as a lump sum all up front. For example: Scrapper Freezing Touch does 16.5788 damage every 0.25 seconds for 2.6 seconds, so 11 ticks, for a total of 182.3668 damage If it crits, it does 182.6796 damage up front. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.ice_melee.freezing_touch&at=scrapper Scrapper 1,000 Cuts does 9.4468 points of Lethal damage (all affected targets) every 0.2s for 2.05s (100% chance) after 0.1s. So that's 11 ticks for 103.9148 damage, plus 43.7931 in one shot at 2.1 seconds, so that's a total of 147.7079 damage, and when it crits it does... 138.2609 damage up front. Slightly less than doubling everything, but obviously not just doubling the non-DoT component. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.dual_blades.high_low&at=scrapper

To hit bonuses, not accuracy bonuses. Defense-beyond-softcap doesn't give you any more mitigation to high-accuracy enemies. And because of that, you need to be fighting +6 enemies before they start getting +to-hit through the purple patch (at which point being overcap would help you, but also man are you real sure you want to fight +6 enemies?).

Btw, with Scrapper ATOs, crits get vastly more likely than 10%. It is now the case that at level 50, with good slotting of ATO2 and PPM abuse, scrappers solidly outdamage brutes.

So if you both have 95% damage enhancement in your powers, then: 1.125 * 1.95 = 2.19375 scale damage for scrappers, excluding crits. Brutes: .75 * (1 + .95 + X) = 2.19375 1 + .95 + X = 2.925 X = .975 When your fury gives you 97.5% damage, you should outdamage a scrapper with similar slotting, excluding crits. So that's when Fury is at 49%.

I extensively roleplayed on Everlasting for years with short, uninformative, "witty" lines or snatches of poetry in my bio. What you put in there is just your style, it's not like there's a requirement.

Everything's additive, not multiplicative. There are as far as I can recall no cases in city of heroes where you get 10% bonus and another 10% bonus and the result is 121%, it's always 120%. (I guess there are some cases where bonuses to two different stats end up being multiplicative to a final result in the system, like to hit and accuracy, or damage and resist damage. But no case where each bonus is multiplied by an arbitrary number of other bonuses).

An extremely strict reading of the 5e stat block for a Rust Monster suggests that the Rust Monster can only voluntarily rust a ferrous metal object with its antennae, but any metal object (not just ferrous) which hits the rust monster is vulnerable to rusting. But that's fairly crazy, and presumably the ferrous qualifier is meant to be applied. Brass is non-ferrous. It does oxidize (to a greenish color, like copper), which I guess isn't technically rust. So, to this obviously extremely relevant topic, I'd say that Nemesis is largely immune to Rust Monsters.

There are a lot of widely divergent Elec sets in this game: Electric Blast (with a significantly different Elec Blast set for Sentinels than Blasters/Corruptors/Defenders) Electrical Manipulation Electric Melee (with a significantly different Elec Melee set for Stalkers than for Scrappers/Brutes/Tanks) Electric Armor Electric Control Electrical Affinity Electricity Assault So because of that, almost every Archetype can have an elec/elec powerset. (Masterminds can't, the epics can't, I think everyone else can). I haven't played Electric Control, Affinity, Assault, or Manipulation beyond lowbie levels and can't really comment on them. Electric Melee is generally considered an AoE set. It has the powerful Lightning Rod mini-nuke attack, which gives sit a very strong once-per-spawn-or-so AoE, then it has Jacob's Ladder (narrow cone, not generally loved), Chain Induction (chain attack, fun, not going to hit the entire spawn or anything), and Thunderstrike (strong AoE to a very small area, weak AoE to a large area, plus knockdown). It lacks much in the way of good ST attacks, though of course Stalkers get an assassin's strike variant. Electric Armor is a pure resist set, and is much better on Tankers/Brutes, with their higher resist caps, than Scrappers/Sentinels/Stalkers. It's known for having a pretty easy time hitting 90% resists to major damage types. It also has near-immunity to endurance drain, good endurance management, a good heal, and a damage aura. I've found it a little painful in early levels, when it has endurance problems, but that's not uncommon for armor sets. Electric Blast was usually considered somewhat weak until the most recent page, when it got some buffs. I'd consider it a good performer but not one of the stand out best blast sets, now. It's unusual, with a toggle pet which can be somewhat frustrating until you get good mez protect by either being level 50 or being a Sentinel.

My stalker's ST attacks were pretty much Frozen Touch, Assassin's Ice Sword, and Moonbeam with occasional Ice Sword (but ideally its place in the rotation was eaten by Build Up or my Bio clickies). Frozen Fists is hot garbage, Ice Sword is mediocre, Greater Ice Sword (for non-Stalkers) is mediocre. The set does have a problem with ST attacks, especially if you aren't really hammering global recharge hard. Frost takes Range enhancements, so you can make its area quite large by slotting a couple of damage/range enhancements in there.

Ice Melee has an awesomely damaging power in Frozen Touch, but non-Stalker versions of it lack another compelling single target attack. Obviously, stalkers get the always reliable assassin's strike. Frost and frozen aura are great area attacks. I soloed around twenty AVs and GMs with an Ice/Bio stalker. They do good damage.

You can't make enemies bow. That bind executes an emote on your character and says, "Your powers are weak, <target name>"