aethereal

Somewhat inspired by the RL ending of the 20 year war in Afghanistan, this is presumably not a very doable suggestion, since the amount of work seems like it'd be too much for the current size of the HC team. But I think it's a valid suggestion if the team ever gets bigger. It seems like there's been eternal stalemate in the war against the downed Rikti mothership for long enough. The Rikti are the earliest and the weakest of the three to four big worldwide threats that CoH presented (the others being Praetoria, Mot, and perhaps Arachnos). Their mobs are not particularly dangerous. Their plot has not gone anywhere since I don't know when. 2008 or something? Earlier? So, I propose: 1. Banish the current RWZ to Echo status. People can still do MSRs there. 2. The event is that the peaceful faction of Rikti take control and negotiate a cease-fire and peace. The Mothership gets taken away (but there are still some buried surprises in the ground around the RWZ). There are maybe some quest-lines for people who are now trying to salvage discarded Rikti tech, and finding cells of still-warlike Rikti in hidden underground bunkers. 3. Vanguard reorients to, I don't know, maybe fight the Battalion if we can ever get that moving, or to contain demonic/multiversal threats out of their current base in the RWZ, with a new quest-line or two.

Definitely not effective, he's almost certainly getting few or no set bonuses from about half of those purples due to the rule of five.

I think Electric Melee needs Thunderstrike to be good AoE. I don't know if it's not good AoE at 3.3 seconds, but yes, there are four powers in the set that do AoE, but Lightning Rod can't be all your AoE, it's on a long recharge. Jacob's Ladder is a bad, narrow cone. Chain Induction is perfectly fine, but doesn't hit many people. Thunderstrike needs to be solid. (It's also weird comparing them to Blasters, as a /elec blaster will very reliably get more than 4 AoE attacks (a cone, a TAoE, and the nuke in their primary, then Thunderstrike and Dynamo in their secondary).

I believe thunder strike for blasters and dominators is 2.5 seconds, but thunder strike for the melee classes is 3.3 seconds. That's what CoD says, anyway.

What I actually did was correct someone who was factually wrong, to which his response was, "Oh, I guess I'm wrong, but I'm somehow right." You will note that I have at no point advocated breaking into Captain Powerhouse's, er, house (powerhouse?) and forcing him to work on my priorities. There's nothing wrong with advocating for the stance of, "This is fine, and there's no point in changing it," or "This is high priority and causing problems." And there's nothing wrong with saying that, "In retrospect, we spent a lot of time solving nonexistent problems." And you don't really need to get out the fainting couch because someone suggested that there are elements of the game that are higher priority than other elements of the game. Your hysterical tone is silly.

Because end debuffs aren't a debuff to the primary mitigation technique of Electric, which is resistance. I'm not arguing against buffs to Regen. I just don't think that RDR is the right kind of buff.

1. People put waaaaaaaaaay too much weight on the name of the set. Regeneration (the set) has heals, +hp, defense, a tiny bit of resistance, and recovery as well as regeneration (the attribute), and that's fine. 2. Electric and Fiery Aura aren't good analogies here. SR is a decent analogy, but: a. SR has fewer tools in its mitigation toolkit than Regeneration. If you are significantly defense debuffed in SR, all you have is your scaling resistance. Regen has two click heals and Moment of Glory if its regen gets debuffed. A better analogy for Regen than SR are the other defense-oriented sets, like Energy Aura, Shield, or Ninjutsu, which have some DDR but not near-immunity to debuffs, in return for some heals and resistances. b. Defense debuffs are massively more common than regeneration debuffs, if SR didn't have high DDR it would be crippled not against an occasional troublesome foe, but against many common enemy groups in their entirety, including fuckin' Council. c. Defense debuffing may be higher impact than regen debuffing, with the rapid increasing/decreasing rewards curve of defense near softcap (I'm not sure about this: I don't know how regen debuffing works, is it multiplicative?) d. Even if points a-c weren't true, there's nothing that says that sets need to be analogous like this. It's okay for Regen to be weak to something relatively uncommon like regen debuffs. Sets have weaknesses. 3. Regeneration needs a lot more than regen debuff resistance to be a good set, and any changes to regen should be focused on making it an actually good set, not in plugging a hole that's not that impactful. It's entirely possible that Regen should get a bit more regen debuff resistance. Should it get 90% RDR because SR gets 90% DDR? I don't think so.

Adding the possibility of a third (customizable) color, and costume pieces that brokered a third color, would be the most consequential costume editor change we could get, but it would be a huge project. The current status quo is that @Magairlín is right, the second color on "with skin" pieces is your skin tone.

I think there's two different things: Eochai and Jack can spawn "normally" or for the Croatoa War? I think?

I... don't think it does.

I don't think that's true. There are other forms of this that are true -- Piecemeal works on arcs, Cpt Powerhouse works on powers, work on arcs does not take away from works on powers and vice versa. But I think that work on the travel powers was the same set of devs that work on powers in general (principally Captain Powerhouse), and all the travel power changes from the last page pushed back far more consequential work.

The Tee option for both men and women has a much higher neck than real normal styles of t-shirt. This is obviously nice if you want to have the color of your shirt meld seamlessly with a head/face color option that extends down the neck, but otherwise, it tends to make the costume piece just subtly wrong. It'd be nice to have a tee-shirt option that had a neckline that wasn't scooped or anything, but stopped an inch or so from the neck. It would also be really nice to have midriff-baring tops-with-skin (for women especially, but it's the 21st Century, why not men, too), that bared like a few inches of midriff, instead of either going all the way to the waist or stopping immediately below the breasts. It'd be nice to get a top that was somewhat similar to the tank top, but featured wider shoulder straps instead of the spaghetti straps that the tank top has (like the metallic dress top, but not metallic and with a more conventional back). All of these would be nice for simulating civilian clothing, though I imagine they'd see some significant use in costuming per se as well.

I mean, sure. Nobody should specifically say, "Stalkers, and nobody else, should get a choice of level one secondary powers." But if we did want to generally give everyone a choice of level one secondary powers, "But Stalkers might skip Hide" is a super weak argument. Hide just isn't that crucial to Stalkers, and there are a million opportunities to skip important powers in this game. You can play a Plant Control character and skip Seeds of Confusion. You can play Energy Melee and skip Total Focus. You can play a Tanker and skip your mez protection. There are a million ways to avoid good powers in this game, and nobody thinks it's a huge problem.

I don't know how I feel about this as a specific thing, for Regen, but I am pretty sure that I don't like a general rule of "you should have near immunity to debuffs in your area of armor strength." Regen has two click heals (EDIT: And MoG!). Why should it have any more regen debuff resistance than, say, Ninjutsu has DDR? Even if it didn't have those, why should it be thematically the case that "regen always regens," instead of "the way to defeat a regenerator is it bring attacks that are hard to regen?" Defense debuffs are ubiquitous, and regen debuffs aren't. The parallel with SR shouldn't be taken as canonical. Regen clearly needs some buff, but I don't see much sign that this is it.

You also don't actually need to kill any AVs for portal jockey, you can do them all as EBs instead.

Honestly, we've already given this topic 10,000% the attention it deserves. I don't just mean this thread, I mean the whole last page. The idea that COH needs more agonizing over the exact extent to which people can trade under 2 minutes of travel for a bit of increased combat efficacy is ludicrous. Having travel powers is important for COH's theme. Being able to fly, teleport, etc does a lot for making you feel like a superhero. But the "balance" between the various forms of "who gets to the door of the mission five seconds earlier" is fundamentally irrelevant. There are plenty of actual problems in COH's powers. It's fundamentally no more challenging to fix the state of squishy epic armors than it was to fix travel powers, and the payoff would be massively higher, just to pick one random example of several.

Oh, duh, my bad. Yes, I was thinking of the pumpkinhead mission.

You're wrong. I tested this explicitly recently. I kept one member of the first running group alive and futilely attacking me, and the next group came as normal. Then I reset the mission and with a couple if teammates killed the whole map. The mission ended successfully the second that we killed the last mob.

The mission does complete if you clear the map. It's a defeat all. It's just a defeat all where each spawn eventually aggros and rushes the portal.

Those builds are from two years ago, not sure if people will still have them. At a glance (I don't have mids to do a deep dive into the numbers; mac user), I think that those builds underinvest in resistance. I think it's a shame to have three LotG sets at 4 pieces, leaving yourself three slots from more than 10% S/L resist.

It'd be nice to be able to have an asymmetry mode for sleeves of jackets and shirts in the same way that we can for boots/gloves/shoulders.

I'm amused that Stalker skipping Hide is such a huge problem. You can make petless Masterminds! I 100% guarantee you that a Stalker without hide can be better than a petless Mastermind.

In fairness, I think he meant that it was not an option to selectively remove the forced-first-power-pick on Tanker secondaries, not that it was not an option to remove it for the whole game. Not that I'm in favor of this proposal. I'm not. But I think it's at least a little worth discussing how few places this game does use speedbump powers as a balance point, and whether that's a particularly desirable balance lever. There are only a few places in the game where you might be forced to take a power you don't really want to gate access to ones you do want. Boxing/Kick. Secondary T1s. Then maybe a few pool T3's. Practically, I think that's about it (like, there's probably SOMEONE who wants Tactics but just hates Maneuvers and Assault, but not a lot of people). It's not a very favored kind of balance and for good reason.

I'm putting the +50% ATO one in Blinding Feint, which I'll spam on cooldown even in AoE situations for the to-hit/damage bonus.

A 3.5 PPM proc that's slotted in a 30 second recharge (no local recharge) 15 foot radius sphere has a 65% proc rate. It wouldn't stun everyone. Still possibly too powerful, but not like you'd do mag 4 to 90% of your targets.