aethereal

Love the idea behind this. Love Athletic Run. I would prefer it if we just got three toggle powers: Ninja Stance, Beast Stance, and Slide Stance. They would be mutually exclusive, zero-cost toggles, either inherent or available through P2W, that do what the stance power does now, but you could then, you know, change between them at will. If you want the current status quo of "one stance all the time," great, you can get that, just toggle the power on and forget it. But if you want to sometimes be in one stance but not all the time, you get it. I guess the current way does make it easy for werewolf-style characters to get a human-form costume and a beast-form costume, but you could do that easily with a macro, or just two clicks, in the "several toggles" system. Anyway, current change is way better than status quo, thanks!

Does literally anyone like the change to not allow shinobi-iri stack with ninja run/combat jumping? In terms of feedback it's like 0 for 20.

They should be solid for brutes. Brutes get the full benefit of fury for energy transfer and total focus, so that's nice for them. They get the better AoE and option for fast energy transfer and improved animation times. There may be some possibilities for scrappers/stalkers to do some advanced stuff with critical manipulation, and brutes will never get two fast energy transfers on a row, but it's a bummer for scraps/stalks to only get quarter-power crits in terms of damage, and brute damage should be ferocious.

I think it'd be nearly impossible to make an AoE mez on a very rapidly used pool power be balanced. It would almost certainly be absurdly short-duration and like mag 2 at the absolute most, non-stacking. The criticism that Defense is boring is on-point, but, I mean, look, the T1/T2 attacks in melee and blast sets are invariably boring as well. Sometimes you need boring stuff to make the game actually work.

If Combat Teleport is to retain the to-hit rather than defense component (which I think is a bad idea and will end up punishing people who thematically want to be like Nightcrawler), it should at least get more duration on the buff. Yes, I get it, it's a little less-than-thematic since the idea is that the to-hit represent surprise and are you really surprised 10 seconds later that the guy teleported? But it's both a huge pain in the ass to teleport every 5 seconds and a significant DPS drop. This may mean either eliminating the stacking or restricting it to only 2 total stacks. Also, people were saying back at the beginning of the thread that CT seemed incapable of proccing Gaussian's proc, did we ever figure that out? EDIT to add: I think people who are comparing CT to Tactics really need to think about power pool opportunity cost. Leadership gives you both to-hit (easier, albeit perhaps more expensive to-hit that has a chance to proc Gaussian's) AND defense AND damage. Combat teleport is the only power in its pool that offer a boost to combat stats. There is no way on God's green Earth that anyone is giving up Hasten for Combat Teleport, this means that most people are now down to just two pools that can accommodate defense bonuses -- Fighting and probably Leadership or Concealment.

Stays around all spenders. TF (crit) > all three spenders light up > use any one of the spenders > all three spenders stay illuminated > use any spender again > highlights go away.

I've been playing a scrapper EM character and I have definitely, on many occasions, critted on TF and correctly got the two stacks of EF, that were correctly spent one at a time.

Don't believe that's true in beta, though I didn't check it with actual teleport, just combat teleport.

I have also seen a hellion inside City Hall on live, it's not exclusive to Beta.

Hey, honest question: What's being solved with the teleport phase thing? Were people finding teleport unsafe as a travel power? Or is this an in-combat thing?

This sounds potentially quite hard, but it'd be cool if there was a command that was like /matchcooldownbyname <power name>, which, if included in a macro, caused the macro in question to cooldown and show the normal grayed-out-and-smaller-icon representation of a power being on cooldown, matching the cooldown of the power named in it. So for example you could do: /macro ice "powexeclocation target ice storm$$matchcooldownbyname ice storm" and thus have a macro that actually behaved like a power.

Sorry for the triple-post. So I'm starting my first mission with (four-slotted) Energy Transfer available, level 33. My very initial impressions are that oh my god, my health is so swingy. As a /invul scrapper, I don't have a ton of healing/regen, so depending on if I crit or not with ET makes a huge difference. Without the superior versions of my ATOs, my crits are somewhat less reliable than they will eventually be (my +50% crit chance proc is in Total Focus, which I think is The Right Move for scrappers), but it feels like they'll never be so reliable as to avoid this -- getting a little unlucky with crit rates for ET seems like it's gonna be big. Stalkers have more ability to near-guarantee crits, which may be a big deal for them -- I was thinking that the ideal stalker move was AS (hide) > TF > ET (fast), but maybe it's TF > AS (hide) > ET (fast), to near-guarantee a heal in your ST attack chain (at the cost of a second fast ET). (I mean, or maybe invul is just a bad pairing with EM -- I'm increasingly feeling that way. Energy Aura is obviously to some degree "the canonical" pairing here, and if I had a big regen boost from Energize, I presumably wouldn't be feeling these ET hits as much.)

How does ET's "health cost" interact with to-hit debuffs? If you miss, do you pay the health cost? I assume you can't "crit" on a miss and self-heal.

Regen debuffs aren't like resist debuffs, where they magnify based on team size. If a regen debuff is "worth it" in terms of your own lost DPS solo, it's "worth it" on a team, and conversely if it's "not worth it" solo, it's "not worth it" on a team. (With a possible exception for enemies who get a regen boost per opponent, but as far as I know those are rare as hen's teeth.)

Okay, walked my EM/Invul scrap through the first Croatoa arc to level 29, then cheated to 33. I finally started to feel a little less fragile towards the ends of the twenties, probably due more to getting Invincibility than anything to do with EM. I continue to think that EM could use a little more polish and care at low levels, though. The move of the guaranteed stun to Barrage is nice, but between endurance issues and very unreliable mitigation, those sort of late-teens, early 20's doldrums were particularly bad. Not a ton else to say, really. Ghosts with their to-hit debuffing suck, you don't like missing on this character. Combat Teleport was only a weak help. Looking forward to having Energy Transfer to play around with.

I am pretty unconvinced that anything would be too horrible if taunt auras allowed procs to auto-hit enemies. Back before PPM, when procs in auras were good? Maybe an issue. Now? Checks once every ten seconds with a low proc rate? One available damage proc? Who cares?

Defense is obviously thematic for combat teleport, and it would not need to be balanced differently. Combat teleport, if it provided defense, would replace hover or combat jumping in some builds. People who are hardcore looking for a fourth pool to add another defense power (after speed, leaping or flying, and fighting) already have concealment and leadership as options.

I remember @Bopper speculating, with seemingly decent evidence, that stalker hemorrhage might be badly coded, and that some of its larger damage might be a mistake. Does the fixing of scrap/stalk savage melee powers nerf any power?

It would be nice if, when you used powexeclocation target combat teleport, if you were teleporting from a lower floor to an upper one, it put you with your feet at the same vertical level as your target's feet. Right now, what happens if you appear beneath the floor of the target.

They mean it won't use up an EF stack that you hope to reserve for ET.

Well, good news, it's radically less time now. Just one exploration badge per destination zone + one full zone exploration. In other news: I've been running a mission against Croatoa Ghosts (who are heavy to-hit debuffers), so I've been just spamming the shit out of Combat Teleport to avoid getting into the floored to-hit you lose cycle. At first, I was feeling pretty negative about it, but I remembered that this is to some large degree because my to-hit monitor doesn't accurately reflect combat teleport. Once I stopped paying attention to the monitor and started to just, you know, kind of eyeball it, it's been.... okay. It's a real pain in the ass to use -- I have to spam CT madly to have its relatively small bonus stack up against the debuffs, and the fact that I don't really know when I've got "enough" to-hit bonus sucks. But I have avoided the negative-to-hit spiral that you get with spawns of entirely to-hit-debuffing enemies.

Very initial feedback on build 2 based on like literally 10 minutes of play: I like the stun being moved to barrage. Makes it easier for me to move to a secondary target, stun them, and then keep my big hitters on the main target I'm taking down. EDIT: Also if I crit on TF, I can lay down two guaranteed stuns in pretty rapid succession, which sometimes is what I want.

I mean, I'm not upset about the accolade power change, but I ran around and got the Atlas Park ones a couple days ago so that I could easily move my beta character back to getting P2W double XP, and it took me considerably more than 5 minutes.

LRTP is still available as an accolade power for picking up all the exploration badges in a zone.

I've been remiss in updating my feedback on my slow grind up levels. For those just joining us, this is an EM/Invul scrapper, I've been entirely solo, currently level 27. So I got TF at level 26. That's a big difference in the fun value of the set even right as you get it, just moving the number of big hitters in the set up from one to two. Honestly, I'd probably switch the positions of it and Whirling Hands. PC provides you with enough AoE (given its fast recharge) for the early 20's, and with TF carrying all of the mechanic of the set, I think it'd be nice to get it earlier. Not that the mechanic is a huge deal for me right now. Without Energy Transfer, there's no DPS add from EF, you either get a bigger area for PC (which I don't really need as I'm not yet facing large groups of foes), or guaranteed stun from BS, which is sometimes nice, but not really amazing, given the single-target nature of it and the plethora of stun options in Energy Melee. It helps my survivability when dealing with bosses, otherwise not a huge deal. If I were teaming, and thus facing larger spawns, I presume the bigger PC would be nice. That said, TF is still welcome with or without much help from the mechanic because, like Bone Smasher is great, but then you go for a long time before you get your next single-target tool, and having another big hit is super nice. With the new animation, it doesn't "feel" slow to me anymore. I mean, it's still a long animation, but it somehow gets under the threshold of feeling glacial. Speaking of survivability, mine still sucks. Almost certainly more to do with Invul than EM, but jesus. Not able to advance the difficulty above +1/x2 so far, and I have deaths from time to time. I'm not playing super conservatively or anything.