Black Zot

The only thing it removes is RNG-based stupidity. LOL at anyone boneheaded enough to think that a debuff that needs to connect in the first place to matter, and that everyone and his dog has some degree of resistance to, somehow matches up well with boosting one's to-hit chance. Strawman much?

So his whole game-making philosophy is built on projection?

It's effective damage that matters, not base damage. Lower target caps and no easy ways to get damage boosts leaves the Sentinel struggling to keep up with Defenders for overall throughput, even if you take the gimped range out of the equation.

Pretty much sums up every thread that mentions balance, really. Some people simply will not be satisfied until a 0x1 spawn becomes a life-or-death struggle.

... Wat.

Aaaaand this right here is why DB is trash tier even when you ignore everyone and their dog having lethal resist. As convoluted as the combo system is, you'd expect some actual reward for pulling it off. Instead you get a little text popup telling you "Congratulations, you pushed your buttons in an order the powers themselves don't bother explaining properly! And your reward for that is JACK SHIT!" The fact that you have to actively go digging for what effect that combo actually had is proof positive that the whole set, in its present state, is a waste of time and code. If you're expected to press 3+ buttons in a specific sequence to get a bonus effect, that bonus better have some "wham" to it.

The problem here is that the Zig DOES crack open quite frequently in canon. Besides the villain tutorial, several alignment/morality missions send you into the Zig, either to stop a jailbreak or to cause one, and many other missions reference escapees - no way in hell did they all get out from that one Arachnos attack, the place would be completely empty. ALL the Zig maps show some level of damage, and ingame text makes it clear the place is in a constant state of "under repair from one or more breaches". Which makes perfect sense, considering that supermax or no, it's still an effort to keep superhumans (some of whom are capable of Boomtown-level destruction) locked up with mostly mundane technology. Breaches WILL happen even without outside shenanigans, and they're going to be messy when they do. So yeah, Ziggursky is every bit as cardboard as any prison in a comic book world. Much like the police, it's there to get Worfed to show how dangerous so-and-so is and why the heroes need to step in. You make a nice overall point, but you picked a terrible example to make it with.

HEATs and Sents are objectively, mathematically trash-tier. This has been demonstrated again and again, and yet no finger has been lifted towards the overhaul needed. Mastermind pets being downleveled is a stupid idea that renders most of them worthless against anything stronger than +1 or +2. And as Apparition said, they desperately need some protection from AoEs. No other AT has the potential to lose nearly all their combat strength to a single AoE that wasn't necessarily even aimed at them. The weaker Mastermind primaries need to be brought up to par; you can't call a primary of any AT viable if you need to carry it with your secondary, and that's what you'll end up doing with anything outside of Demons/Thugs/Robots.

You mean it gives the haves something to hold over the have-nots so they can say "I'm better than you". That's the ultimate effect of an unseeded market and price inflation; don't try to pretend otherwise because we both know that's bullshit.

That would render them a waste of a slot.

If you want to make it look like he knows how to fight? Street Justice all day. MA is for people who think wire-fu is too realistic.

To me, a power can only be called perma if you can set it to autofire and forget about it. Does that make for tight and expensive builds? Yes. But any other way of doing it drives me insane. "This power will stay up all the time if you just keep clicking this and this and tha-" FUCK THAT SHIT. If you've got time to babysit a power to that degree, you didn't need it to begin with.

Yeah, I dropped it when they insisted I link my Steam account to ARC (a Chinese spyware program masquerading as security) in order to keep playing.

Despite the hype, there's still a lot of R&D between "self-driving" and "road-ready", and another huge gap between that and "affordable". Don't hold your breath.

Scorpion Shield is pretty much the best defense shield in the game. It grants defense against the 3 most common damage types and resists against a type that's otherwise hard to get any kind of protection from. It also has some of the least obtrusive VFX if you value your costume design at all. The fact that the rest of the pool is either ugly or garbage simply gives you some build room to work with.

A tedious workaround that STOPS working any time the game gets patched is hardly a solution. And that's IF a sound mod created by a big-boom-lover actually does what he claims - a claim I have no reason to believe given your constant "bring back the painful noises" harping. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the person who enjoys inflicting physical pain on people is upset about not getting compassion from the person they're hurting. You have no claim on the moral high ground, Your Wannabe-Holiness. I'm the one being actively denied any enjoyment of the game by the current state of things. I'm the one who has to take a painkiller after teaming with a SS toon, or has to desummon MM pets every time he plans to zone because of the ear-rape of 18 simultanuous power effects going off, or needs to spend half an MSR alt-tabbed because there's half-a-dozen Kins in the raid, or insert any other sound-stacking powerset and the resultant headache. And for the record, I generally DON'T watch TV or movies unless I have direct control of the volume, partly because of the absurdly-inconsistent recording volumes endemic to the medium.

Oh, so all that endless whining about the ability to deafen people at the touch of a button being "nerfed" was someone else using your account then? You say you'll leave if the devs do any more damage to your ability to troll people. I pity the denizens of whatever server you decide to inflict your presence on if you do. Seeing as you not caring about the harm you're causing is exactly the problem here.

My problem is you're fighting for a completely unacceptable status quo. As long as you treat the ability to inflict ear-rape as your god-given right, you're on my shitlist.

One of the reasons I rarely play melee is it means being at ground zero when a saturated Foot Stomp goes off. At volume settings where any other game would be inaudible, THAT effect has the potential to get me in trouble with the neighbors. I might as well set off a bomb on my desk. The game should have launched with the option to turn that shit off. There's no excuse not to have it now, umpteen years of development later.

That's like saying [insert number here] is the easiest Dark Souls game.

Two clicks with at least one very long animation, plus whatever buffs from your secondary you need to throw out. AT LEAST 4 seconds before the pet's battle ready, not counting summon time. In the middle of a firefight, that's forever. If you've lost more than one pet, you'll have to more-or-less completely disengage from the fight to resummon unless you want the newcomer to die instantly and waste the end.

Put it on the biggest layer cake map you can find and add a strict time limit. Mind you, don't expect anyone but a demented fool to PLAY that mission.

And don't try to pretend THAT'S not an utterly boneheaded piece of design.