Black Zot

I'm getting sick of seeing this argument in particular. Newsflash: if you're end-drained to the point where toggles drop, you're dead regardless of being mez-shielded or not. Because all the effects that were keeping the enemy's normal, non-mezzing attacks from smearing you across the floor? Just. Got. Switched. Off. Which means all that incoming damage WILL hit you, at full force. You're not mezzed, but it doesn't matter because you're still helpless.

Doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would mess with some people's brains. Maybe a version without the lasers strobing around would help?

This. Nerfs are categorically the wrong direction for anything that doesn't outright break the game somehow, and TW doesn't do that.

+1 to anyone who calls out the complete lack of logic in being able to buff an ally but not yourself. Why should the SOURCE of the protective mojo be the most fragile person in the group?

No, my issue is that the writing assumes the character is a nincompoop; don't try to override what I'm saying. Assuming inexperience is fair for low-level arcs. Assuming STUPIDITY most certainly is not, and the Twinshot story is the latter.

I'm not asking for arcs tailored to my character; that's impossible. What I'm asking for is to NOT TREAT ME LIKE A GODDAMN IDIOT. Have a little bit of basic human respect and assume my character knows how to tie his own shoes without a diagram. I'm tired of being insulted by people writing their story arcs for subjects whose IQ is within 10 points of their shoe size. Games should be written by writers, not preschool teachers. "Be flexible" has limits.

This right here is my single biggest gripe about writing in any MMO. The PC is always a drooling moron in the eyes of quest writers. Before being allowed to work on any game, people should be forced to browse TVTropes for a few days so they realize there's more options for a player character than "idiot hero".

Would be really nice to have my Fortunata tossing blasts that are some color other than pinkish-blech.

Recharge slotting to perma works exactly as long as it takes the game to spawn a recharge slow and a mezzer in the same pack. Soon as that happens, your mez protection drops -> you get mezzed -> your other defenses shut down -> you die before anything comes back online. Speaking from cold, hard experience, if you're mezzed and have aggro, a breakfree effect won't save you. The only protection is to not get mezzed in the first place, and click protection simply doesn't cut it. These powers need to be either toggles or perma before slottingx before I will even consider using these sets.

So I'm leveling up a toon goldside (oy vey), and some Resistance nitwit tells me "You ain't so rocky." I proceeded to demonstrate why you don't say that to an Earth/Earth dominator.

This right here is the main reason Repair is crap. Anything that poses enough of a threat that a big heal looks attractive, won't give you a chance to cast said heal. The assault bot is the only one that even has enough effective HP to MAYBE survive the first swing from a big hitter.

Interesting note: The short-lived comic book series "U.N.D.E.R.S.E.A. Agent" had, as one of its established villain groups, a faction called THEM - The Hosts of Evil Motives.

Oy vey, I hope not. Marvel and DC have tried their hands at the whole MMO thing before, and every offering has been a miserable failure. Like I really want to pay more money to Di$ney to try out another half-baked joke of a product that'll either die or become microtransaction hell within a year.

You'll forgive me for saying that ethics, much like the laws and customs of war, only applies if both sides are willing to play nice. Any company that has the nerve to claim they're selling a complete game, then demand my entire paycheck to buy all the parts they left out, has no business expecting one single penny from me - or anyone.

Presently, every problematic power in your build costs one slot to make it not hose your team, up to a max of 6 (1 OF proc plus 5 SA procs being the max available). That's up to 6 powers that are going to be flatly weaker than their counterparts in other sets because they're down an enhancement slot. Your Alpha idea instead fixes the powers in question at the cost of denying EVERY power an Alpha enhancement they would otherwise have. So instead of short-slotting half a dozen powers, you're now short-slotting twenty-plus powers. That is almost petless-Mastermind-tier build-gimping. I dunno how much more plainly I can spell this out.

Note that the OF proc affecting the whole character is presently being tested on Justin; that's what got this thread started. That wouldn't happen if the devs thought KB->KD should cost slots from every single affected power. Facts are facts. KB is the worst secondary effect for an offensive set bar none, and sets that "feature" it offer nothing to make up for disrupting the entire team every time the player pushes a button. Your suggested alternative to taxing every knockback power a slot to make it usable in a team environment is to essentially tax EVERY POWER IN THE PLAYER'S BUILD.

How does it NOT gimp a build to expend a third of your most powerful enhancement option on something that even the HC team acknowledges shouldn't cost more than one slot?

It does buff both the MM and the pets. MMs will love you for taking it.

So you want people to gimp their entire build worse than any slot investment could ever do, to free up some slots? Do you not realize how bass-ackwards that is?

I think part of it was, it broke certain powersets clean in half. Anything with massive mitigation (coughGranitecough) or bonuses for nearby targets could just pull the entire map and lay waste, which sucked for anyone who couldn't keep up or didn't have a badass graphics card. It also ran directly counter to the vehement anti-farming stance the devteam had for most of the Live run.

Agreed. Minions are fragile to begin with; anything that cons higher than yellow will squash them easily while laughing off their offense. Collectively, they do a character's worth of damage baseline, but most of that gets whisked away by the underlevel penalty. Everyone is hurt by this to some degree, but for MMs the effect is basically multiplied by the number of pets, then magnified again by most of those pets being even lower level. I ran a Thugs MM in a group a couple months ago and we ran into an AV that, for some reason, spawned as +4 even though we were running at +0. Re-summoning my pets was a complete waste of time and end; poor guys never even got a swing in before a Footstomp deleted them. The Live devs sorta half-acknowledged this problem by level-shifting minions for Incarnate content only, but that's a bandaid on a massive laceration.

Unlikely. Korean corporate culture would rather see an IP die than see anyone but themselves benefit from it. It makes the company look bad if someone else takes your stuff and makes it work where you couldn't. And you don't keep a job at ANY company, from ANY country, by making your employer look bad.

Because there's still a city within minimum safe distance?

The sticking point is that the entire Super Strength set is balanced around the assumption that players have Rage active basically at all times, often multi-stacked to negate the crash. The raw numbers on SS attacks are almost universally garbage without Rage, especially since everybody and his dog is smash-resistant to some degree. HC devs fixed the bug that allowed for the crash-skipping without changing the set's numbers otherwise, basically taking a mid-tier set down to trash-tier in one go. (SS's reputation as a high-damage set comes entirely from one gimmick farming build that revolves around getting the recharge on the set's one genuinely strong power (Foot Stomp) down to "spammable", stacking Rage as high as it would go, and bolstering that with the buffs from Fire Armor. With the Rage change, that build is now dead as disco.) A lower-grade, no-crash Rage would still leave SS in a bad way, unless the set's baseline numbers get buffed significantly in the bargain. So it's not a case of SS players wanting it all so much as wanting to be viable. EDIT: Rage-dependency isn't even SS's only problem; knockback is pretty much the worst secondary effect you can saddle a melee set with. For me to consider making a SS character would require removing the knockback (or at least making it knockDOWN), and fixing the set's borked numbers somehow.

The problem is, for negotiations to end well BOTH sides have to approach the table in good faith, and NCSoft has an established history of not doing that. It doesn't matter if we trust the HC team or not - NCSoft still has the power to take their ball and go home anytime they please, and the tendency to do just that.