Lockpick

I agree with all of these comments. ENA for me is a bread and butter attack and has been since the very low levels. I start off with Ranged Shot and then alternate Snap Shot, Aimed Shot, and ENA for my single target chain throwing in Ranged Shot as well. The chain is particularly useful if I get mezzed.

There has been a ton of work that has gone into this update and I appreciate all the effort from the HC team. That being said, I have been thinking that there is actually to much content in this update. I know that is heresy, but give me a sec. I have been doing some testing the last several days and there is no way I am going to be able to test most of the content, so my focus has been on the things that interest me (Tactical Arrow, EM on Stalkers, Story Arc, and LRT). Others will test what interests them. We have a small player base, so it seems likely that many changes will not get tested by many players as they will be more likely yo focus on their core interests. I guess my point is that (IMO) it might have been better to do smaller and more frequent releases, so that there could be more focused testing on content. For example: One release on the changes to Blaster secondaries and the new secondary One release on TP changes One release on EM One release on story arcs I'm not sure if this leads to more overhead or not because I expect functionality is managed by different team members. Anyway, I was thinking about this stuff, so thought I would post to provide the perspective.

My character did have the Posi TF badges and did have the badges for switching alignment, which were mentioned in the dialogue I saw. I did not have the badge from the hero arc as I did that on a different character. I do recall in the mission thinking that I would be very impressed to find out that my choices had impacted the dialogue I saw. If this is the case it leads to all sorts of possibilities for stories and I have to say that is awesome! If this is the case, any chance we can get that functionality on AE for content creators?

Thank you for this note. I think it is very valuable to get this type of feedback from players that don't post often. I have edited your post to add paragraphs to make it easier to read as I am concerned people will skip over your post because it is not easy to read in it's original form.

I made 2 Savage / SR stalkers, but caught the lower level one at 21.

I did run through it, but with a different character. Why would the story language be telling my current character about things he wouldn't know about?

Smoke Grenade has -ToHit as well.

I honestly didn't notice. I'll do some more testing today. I use Flash Arrow more for the -Perception along with SS and a stealth IO to help stealth mobs and consider the -ToHit to be a bonus. I generally consider Flash Arrow to be the equivalent of Smoke Grenade from Devices. Not sure why they would adjust Flash Arrow and not Smoke Grenade. It is difficult to understand these changes when the problem trying to be solved is not understood. It looks like a hammer searching for a nail.

My reading of the dialogue made me think it was the Positron Task Force they were referring to as it kept mentioning the Dam. Good idea on the tab, but I am talking about the dialogue where you make a choice. Does that show up?

I just did the new Villain arc with my Archery / TA blaster and thought I would give an update on play style before and after. I transferred from Live to Beta and did a respec. I had 2 slots in what used to be gymnastics, but were now in OSA. I created the same build I had before, but took OSA at 49. The arc I was on limited me to 39, so I did not get to use OSA during the arc. Electrified Net Arrow I didn't really have issues except with one power - ENA. In the first mission, I was using ENA at the beginning and was thinking the change wasn't as bad as I thought. However, the longer I played the more impact I felt from the lack of range on ENA. I won't say this power is useless without the range, but it is certainly much less useful than it is on HC Live. I am currently slotted with 6 Thunderstrike. I respectfully request that the range be increased. Ice Arrow I don't use Ice Arrow, so cannot comment on this one, although I expect people that do use will also not like the range change. Upshot I didn't really notice a big impact with this adjustment. Flash Arrow I didn't really notice a big impact with this adjustment. Gymnastics I slotted a LoTG and a Reactive Defense proc. I didn't really notice a big impact with this adjustment. ESD Arrow I didn't really notice a big impact with this adjustment, because I don't really use it that often. I think changing it so it has a hold on robots and a stun on non-robots is not a good design change and would suggest to leave it as a hold. What is the problem you are trying to solve by making this adjustment? Oil Slick Arrow I did try it before I took the mission and just lit it with a Blazing Arrow. I expect I'll keep it with one slot and either put an Annihilation - Res or Overwhelming Force Damage / KD. Again, I don't know the problem that is trying to be solved here and would argue the original powers were fine as they were.

You have to wait for some hacking or something before you can click the glowie to open the door iirc.

Took a level 50 Archery / TA Blaster to do this one. Switched to Villain, went to oro, got the mission, and started. Playing at default notoriety. I am writing my thoughts as I do the arc and will post when complete. Mission 1 The early verbiage told me this mission was going to be tough and to take friends. I went solo, but that warning kept me on my toes. Entered the mission door and was immediately attacked. I realized as I was entering the mission that I only had EoE inspirations, so was exiting as I was attacked, so no harm. I am curious how the mob saw me when I entered since I have 65' stealth. Anyway, went back into the mission and slowly worked through it. Because I went slowly and tactically this mission was fairly easy. Nice mission, I liked the various choices the boss offered, dialogue was fine for the most part, but parts of it indicated that I had been a hero that put Dr. V in the Zig and had changed alignment. Is that dialogue based on my character? If so, very well done. If it is standard dialogue, you are going to have conflicts with characters that have not done the TF or were not a hero that switched to Villain. Mission 2 Dialogue indicates that I showed up in person even though I called the contact. There is some dialogue that is incorrect: "an apple's hit me on the head!" should be an apple has hit me on the head. Nice mission, not a fan of rescue missions normally, but this one was pretty good. The map was new to me, which was nice. Mission was fine. I cleared on the way in, so doing the rescue and having the victim follow me out was fine. Called contact. I really like the dialogue " Oh, and if you hear any odd noises, it's just the Cattleprod of Motivation being used. For science". Very nice! Mission 3 Very nice all around. Dialogue was great, mission was nice with the support. I was concerned that one of the 3 support guys might be defeated and how that would impact the mission, but it didn't happen. Mission 4 Dialogue good as usual. Buzz is sending me to gather material for her. Not a fan of these types of missions. I will say at this point I am getting a little tired of the missions, so this arc may be a bit long or maybe my patience is lower as I get older. Loot council - Nice mission, good challenge Steal from Crey - Travel to Cap Au Diablo, up to this point have been in Sharkhead the entire time and not having to go to multiple zones has been a huge plus for me. Use mission TP power. Mission is fine. Ambushes when fighting the boss were doable. Got an incarnate shard. Invite Bile to the Party - Back to Sharkhead. Use Team Transporter. Hope there aren't more zones because I don't have a SG base on Beta and I am out of TP tools. Got an incarnate shard. Seems like I am getting more than usual. Dialogue was great. Defeated TechDeck and he disappeared, but mission dialogue says I have to negotiate with him. Defeat ambushes and still can't find him. Exit mission hoping it will solve problem, nope. Logout and back in. Do mission again. This time I use Electrified Net Arrow to slowly take down his health and when he is defeated he stays there. The ambushes while negotiating with Bile are a pain. I think once you get to this point the ambushes should stop, so you can read the dialogue. Nice dialogue! [NPC] TechDeck: WAIT! Let's rap battle about this, homie! [NPC] TechDeck: HAH HAH HAH! Oh, man! You really did a number on me. Mission 5: Arc is still going. We are actually 7 missions in at this point because mission 4 was 3 separate missions. I feel like I am doing a Task Force and not a story arc. The dialogue is definitely making up for the length though. I'm interested in seeing what's next. Dialogue great, found Cortex, but he was blue and didn't have the option to defeat him. Not a fan of rescue missions and would have preferred to hand Bile a TP device and let him TP out of there and end the mission there. 20 merits and a badge; took me 2 hours and 50 minutes. I may try this again to see if I can reduce the time. I think the merits are a little light for the time and number of missions. Overall: 10/10 I thought this was great dialogue all the way through. I only noticed one spelling issue and I was reading all the dialogue carefully (that I could see; there would have been options leading to dialogue I couldn't see). The missions were fine, difficulty was fine for my character. Might be tough for the level range for some characters. The ambushes got old after awhile and I think it was a bit long. There are some areas where the missions could be tightened up to save time. It is obvious a lot of work and thought went into this arc and it is one of the better ones I have played in quite some time. I believe my favorite arcs in the game are Graham Easton and Laura Lockhart and this arc is right up there for me. I don't usually play villain side, so not sure how often I will do it, but if I take characters over to get the patrons unlocked I will definitely do this arc, especially if the rewards get bumped a bit. How about a temp power that lets us summon 5 Vahz like the Graham Easton temp power to summon 5 Tsoo? Thank you! Awesome job! I hope to see other missions with Piecemeal in the future! Final Edit: I went and did some exercise and when I came back I realized I never left the mission. Left the mission and called contact. There is a duplicate "the" in the final mission dialogue. Bold red below: "But speaking of walking nightmares, Clamor and Dreck being loose is a real hammer to the the spleen that nobody was expecting. Not today, at least! We're going to have to keep our ears to the ground for them, they won't be happy. Pierce is already not too happy, as we lost an entire platoon of the Freaklok in there, but they were all rigged with self-immolation protocol to protect the research. One of Pierce's many good ideas!"

Thank you for taking the time to provide this explanation. It makes sense and is logical.

This thread is a hodgepodge of different opinions about the different sets. It is getting a little difficult to keep up with due to the overall nature of looking at all blaster secondaries instead of focusing on one. I would suggest each secondary should have gotten its own thread, although I know that would likely be more effort to maintain. I would really like to know the problems that are trying to be solved by some of these changes. There is an old adage about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I see a lot of changes here that are baffling to me and seem to be changes just for the sake of making changes.

I will echo (see what I did there) what some of the others have said. I get why this was done. The base TP macro was really a GM thing never intended to be used by players and has been on the radar for a fix for a long time. I understand that portion and don't have a problem with it. I like the LRT accolade and am even okay with having to earn the available zones through exploration The challenges I see are really around all the various TP powers and their various recharges and activation times. I would suggest they should all operate the same and my suggestion would be that they all drop a portal like Oro does that you can enter and the recharge and activation should be similar to the oro portal. Not a fan of the length of time it takes to activate the SG TP accolade power as is. I copied a character over to Beta that had AP already explored. On Beta he didn't automatically get the accolade. I went to SC and did the exploration and got the LRT power. When I tried to use it it only showed SC and no other zones. Seems like a bug because I cannot re-explore AP to get the badges because I already have them.

A bunch of power sets and powers have been buffed / nerfed on Beta. It seems this thread was a waste of time and the devs aren't really interested in feedback at all. There is no way these changes weren't well under way long before this thread was started.

I have to agree with this as well. I'm fine with the changes to Mez, but not the range. I use ENA at range with SS and AS. I want my A/TA character to play at range, not get into melee range. Please revert the range back to HC Live range.

Thank you HC team! The amount of work that went into this update is outstanding.

Thank you. I liked the amount of choices that were provided and do like the intent to make it more immersive and having the choices drive the way the arc flows. That is extremely hard, so definitely appreciate the effort. I should mention that I was on a stalker (EM/EA), so had to deal with the waves of enemies exploding. My defense was high as I was using an end game build, so could see it being challenging for lower levels. I got wrecked in the one mission where I had waves of Psy foes attacking me because I have a Psy hole in the defense.

First Thoughts: All in all I felt it was okay, but I haven't finished it yet. Seems like some serious old school mission design. Start in SC The contact here was nice, I liked the video he received on his phone which sent me to a mission, this is an upgrade to modern times Go to Sky Go to Talos. Kill 20 Freak (really? defeat 20 Freaks to get info for the door mission? Why couldn't I get the info for the door mission from the boss in the previous mission?) Talos Mission I called into the contact after the mission and he was acting like I had handed him some notes even though he is in SC and I am in TI. I would suggest saying I sent him an email with the notes or something. Keep it modern with the smart phone angle that was created at the beginning of the story. Go to Sky, Travel halfway across the map to talk to someone Go halfway across Sky and talk to someone else Go across Sky to some call boxes (after all this runaround I was irritated and decided I was done with it for now) My honest feedback is that I am not interested in running all over the place like it is 2004 again. The missions I did were fine, the dialogue was fine, the spelling of the dialogue was fine, combat was fine, etc., but running around everywhere just made me feel like I was back playing an old school mission arc. Maybe that is the intent, but not something I would be interested in doing more than once. If you are going to have this type of mission arc I suggest adding a badge. I doubt this arc is something people will do over and over without some incentive. There are some badges and merits, so nice to have some rewards for this arc. I hate being so negative because I know a ton of work went into this arc, but I wanted to provide my candid feedback. I'll go finish it, but wanted to get my feedback in when I hit the frustration level. Edit: Starting back up and finishing arc. Go across Sky to some call boxes (after all this runaround I was irritated and decided I was done with it for now) Travel around Sky to 4 different call boxes Call contact Go to Faultline to Investigate the Rusty Rivet Bar Which apparently has a top notch VIP room, so I was surprised that I was entering a bar through a manhole cover Chapter 6 Intro Long run on sentence in the Intro New sentence started with a lower case "we" The player response should end in a question mark Go to IP (are you f'ing kidding me?) This mission was interesting and the choices were a treat Watkins has turned into a dick and is asserting some authority he thinks he has Go to KR This mission was pretty good and I was defeated once as I got overwhelmed. I liked the dialogue and choices. All in all it was a decent experience, but probably something I would only run once. Not something I would do for every character. By contrast I run the Graham Easton and Laura Lockhart story arcs on pretty much all my characters. Just my feedback, wish it was better.

I took in 3 of my Blasters to test out changes for powers that I currently have in game. Energy Manipulation Total Focus Cast time reduced from 3.3 seconds to 2.53 seconds Great change, thank you. Martial Combat Ki Push Damage increased from scale 0.8 to scale 1.32 Reaction Time Absorb has been adjusted to match Cauterizing Aura's Heal per Second and can now stack up for up to 12 seconds No longer shows floating numbers by default A new "Show Floaters" theme is available if you prefer seeing the Absorb numbers Ki Push change is great. I'm not a big fan of the hokey mechanics of Reaction Time when deactivating the power gives you a burst of speed and some recharge. It doesn't make sense to deactivate a power to get a benefit. Can these effects be added to the power itself? I'm also not a fan of the slow affect aggroing bad guys, but it is what it is. Description: (Paragon Wiki): You attune yourself to the world around you, moving with preternatural speed. All enemies nearby move slowly and have reduced recharge, and you can absorb small amounts of damage every 2 seconds. When Reaction Time is deactivated, you gain a burst of speed for a short duration, increasing your own recharge and move speed. Ninja Training Immobilizing Dart Toxic damage over time doubled to bring it in line with other single target immobilize powers Sting of the Wasp Recharge increased from 5s to 10s Damage increased accordingly (per the standard damage formulas) Shinobi No longer grants a damage buff outside of stealth Now grants the caster a 20% chance to inflict lethal criticals with every attack The amount of damage will be based on the recharge time of the power Usually this will be 80% of the standard damage formula This bonus damage ignores enhancements and damage buffs Golden Dragonfly Recharge increased from 12s to 20s Damage increased accordingly (per the standard damage formulas) Good changes overall, but I would prefer adding the movement buff into Shinobi like Scrappers and Sentinels have. For me this was the major reason to take this set and this entire time I have been waiting on a bug fix. Edits Begin Here: Tactical Arrow Electrified Net Arrow Range reduced from 80ft to 50ft to be in line with other Blaster Manipulation T1 Immobilize powers Endurance cost increased from 5.2 to 7.8 to be in line with other Blaster Manipulation T1 Immobilize powers Ice Arrow Range reduced from 80ft to 60ft to be in line with other Blaster Manipulation ST mez powers Recharge increased from 12s to 16s Hold changed from Mag 3, Scale 12 to: Mag 2, Scale 10 (non stacking) Mag 1, Scale 6 (stacking) Upshot +Recharge buff reduced to from 30% to 15% +Damage buff reduced from 100% to 81.25% +ToHit reduced from 20% to 15% Flash Arrow This power's effects are no longer irresistible Gymnastics (Replaces Agility) Gymnastics and Agility have been merged into a new toggle power Provides knockback protection, a 1.75% defence buff, a recharge bonus, a movement speed buff and some slow / mez protection If you previously had Agility, you now have Gymnastics ESD Arrow Hold now only applies to robots. Hold changed from Mag 3, Scale 8 to: Mag 2, Scale 8 (non stacking) Mag 1, Scale 5 (stacking) Added Stun against non robots: Mag 2, Scale 8 (non stacking) Mag 1, Scale 5 (stacking) Now accepts Stun enhancements and sets Oil Slick Arrow (Replaced Gymnastics) Similar to the Trick Arrow version, but does not have a defence debuff and only has a 15ft radius If you previously had Gymnastics, you now have Oil Slick Arrow I am not a fan of many of these changes especially on the Range of the powers being reduce. I chose this set for theme and to play at range. I use ENA in my attack chain and moving up to use it is going to make it pointless for me, but I am still forced to take it. While I like the merger of Gymnastics and Agility I don't like the changes. If you are going to merge them combine the powers as opposed to nerfing a portion of it. I would rather keep both powers as is than merge a waeakened version of the powers together and giving OSA. I doubt I will ever take OSA. Devices Taser Fixed this power doing PvE damage in PvP Gun Drone Now has 80% resistance to all damage Taunt aura reduced to 8ft, mag 3, max of 4 targets Death explosion now has a knockup component These changes seem reasonable. I can't really comment on the other sets as I haven't played them to high enough level. Although I will say this seems like a lot of work that wasn't really needed.

I was just about to ask if they fixed the bug that didn't give the speed buff. Sounds like you are saying that they just removed the text and they may never have seen it as a bug. That is disappointing. The main reason I took it was for Shinobi and to get the movement.

Maybe I was a bit irritated, but I didn't want to make a big deal of it. The community is small as is, so don't want to alienate anyone. I was actually more worried that my team mates were going to be pissed at me for quitting mid-TF. This is aligned with my expectation of an ITF speed run as well, so was surprised when it turned into a defeat all.

Is issue 27 and page 6 the same thing?

I am usually fine with a defeat most or all, but today just didn't have the time. I wasn't aware the XP bonus was higher if the mission is completed faster. Is that confirmed any where?