aethereal

To indicate... what? Ah, that its buff is still active. Sure, sounds good!

I never looked into it during live, but this wiki page makes the claim that there was a name release system on live. https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Name_Policy It seems like a lot of people on this thread are assuming that there was not.

There may be some work to extend some tables, and of course the level 54 limit may be implicit in lots of places, but there's no fundamental reason why the system is unable to handle 55's. Like, exactly how much work is it? Don't know. Is it impossible? It's surely not.

I'm not proposing a change there. Just like at level 49, with a level shift, you'd be fighting +3's and +4's, under this scheme at 50, with a level shift, you'd be fighting +3's and +4's (instead of just +3's).

If you play a +4 mission at level 45, you'll see a mix of level 49 and level 50 enemies. If you play a +4 mission at level 49, you'll see a mix of level 53 and level 54 enemies. If you play a +4 mission at level 50, you'll only see level 54 enemies. Why are we making level 50 play a little easier than the rest of the game? Allow level 55 enemies, so that a level 50/+4 mission will give you a mix of +4 and +5 enemies, just like +4 missions do for the entire rest of the range of the game. You wouldn't have to create any new enemies or change their powers.

Incarnate alpha shift does help. But remember that if you set your difficulty to +3, you see a mix of +3 and +4 opponents. So with an alpha shift, that would be a mix of +2 and +3 opponents, and you would be able to pull half the bosses, roughly. (I think that the tendency of some people to play at 50/+4 makes them not to remember this, because there are no level 55 opponents, so they don't see it. But if you play at +4 on level 49 or lower, you will see a mix of +4 and +5 opponents!)

Lack of LOS would have some pretty potentially unpleasant surprises in things like office maps -- you might pull a spawn that was through a wall and you didn't even know about.

The problem with changing the crashing godmodes into better powers -- of whatever form -- is that do armor sets really need buffs? Do we really need scrappers and stalkers to be yet more unkillable? The armor set classes, except sents and maybe brutes, are in great shape, even with bad and eminently skippable T9s.

Wait, medical research buffs? How do they buff you?

For whatever it's worth, Scorpion/Mace Mastery is I think only universally beloved for people who get access to Scorpion Shield. For armored melee classes, you'll see Soul Mastery for either Gloom or Moonbeam and Shadow Meld, or Mu Mastery for Zzap and Ball Lightning. Sentinels like Psi Mastery. That isn't to say that we shouldn't address the dominance of Scorpion Shield compared to the other epic armors, but it's certainly not the case that the only villain epic pool that matters is Mace.

Paragon wiki shows only one arc for Montague.

I think you're misunderstanding the role of seed generation in problems of randomness. Bad seed generation creates security flaws through predictability, which shouldn't be relevant here. It should not result in lopsided distributions of numbers. There was a thread a ways back in which someone parsed a long combat log for to hit values. Distribution of values looked pretty even, which is what I'd expect. Now, the more subtle problem could be streakiness. That is, you might have a situation where the probability of rolling >95 is very close to 5%, but where the probability of rolling >95 conditional on the last roll being >95 was >5%, and the probability of rolling >95 conditional on the last roll being <95 was <5%. But the parsimonious explanation here is human memory bias.

You rescue him in the first mission of the second part of Who Will Die. I think there may be other times in the Wards arcs?

I think it's a good idea, though it could lead to a scenario where, like it seems like somebody should hear you but they can't and be confussing.

Hasten: clearly in need of a buff.

The big thing that leveled up my bio armor game was not chasing the use of DNA Siphon or Parasitic Aura as proc-bombs, preferentially using Parasitic Aura as my first mitigation, and trying to make sure there where 5+ dead bodies around when I used DNA siphon for the enduring regen bonus. At first, I tended to use DNA Siphon just as a heal or as a proc-bomb, and doing that really leaves you with a lot less regen than you can get otherwise. I also tended to use Parasitic Aura as a panic button due to its longer cooldown, but it's not great when it only hits half the spawn (because the other half are dead). I do take Shadow Meld (but just one-slotted with lotg) to have one more reserve way to deal with tough enemies. If you maximize the mitigation that you get out of your defensive clickies, you don't need capped defenses and, as @Saikochoro says, concentrate on doing high ddamage.

Power Siphon could clearly be tweaked into being a little better without much difficulty. Just increase its duration a little and/or reduce its animation time. It being differentiated in how it plays compared to normal Build Up is, in my opinion, positive. We want sets to be different! I think a bigger issue with KM in the current meta is that part of its appeal is supposed to be fairly good quick hits in the lower-tier attacks with short animation times. But in today's proc-oriented meta for melee sets, we're all looking for high-recharge attacks, and in KM all the high-recharge attacks have long animation times.

It is plausibly the case that Regen gets more out of Shadow Meld and recharge bonuses than other sets do. That said, it seems clear to me that that doesn't take regen to being a good set.

You know that clicking LRT enables enterbasefrompasscode, right? So you can now click LRT, then click your enterbase macro, and it will work (even if you are not near a portal).

BU in secondary, aim in primary.

My (level 22 character) movement rates with athletic run + sprint + swift + hurdle (+ a small movement bonus from a set): Run speed: 50.26 mph Jump speed: 48.19 mph Jump height: 32.11 ft My movement rates with Panther travel power (+ a small movement bonus from a set): Run speed: 53.98 mph Jump speed: 46.61 mph Jump height: 20.16 ft Not that 1M inf is a super big deal, but given that I got it for RP reasons, I think it'd be nice if it were a bit better than the free options? Maybe around 60mph run speed, 50mph jump, 30 ft jump height?

I mean, you could scale either regeneration (the stat) or healing with current health. You could also scale regeneration based on enemies around you. If your only goal is to give regen an ability to dig itself out of a pit more than it does today (and I agree that the thresholdy nature of regen is a big problem), then you don't need resists or defense to do it, though it might be a little easier/less fiddly with resists or defense.

I think it'd probably be useful for people in this thread who are making suggestions to preface their suggestions with something like: This is what I perceive the problems of Regen to be (for example: ability to survive alpha, overall power, click-heaviness, particular holes) Here's my vision for the set (for example: "an overall high-end mitigation set without click-heaviness with weaknesses to -recharge and alpha strike but no weaknesses to -heal/-regen"). A bonus would be, "here's what I perceive a the niche of regen being as compared to willpower and maybe bio."

I like ideas along this line much better than either "instant healing as a toggle" or "absorb everywhere" proposals.

Stone Fists has better DPA than Stone Mallet, and has a base recharge of 4s. With just ordinary slotting, it's recharge will be somewhere in the realm of 1.33s on a level 50 build. It's all the filler that Stone Melee needs. Just to be clear: you're super wrong that dropping the recharge of Stone Mallet dropping from 8s to 4s would have balance implications that would "cause ripples" in level 50 performance.