Black Zot

Part of the reason I don't trust the devs' claims that the new patch does anything to address the ear-rape inflicted by certain powers is that they're using that same patch to introduce a whole powerset that runs on ear-rape.

People keep saying that Taunt applies a range debuff. Personal experience says that's horseshit.

Six-Six has the right of it. The majority of people in any given random sample simply are not cut out for leadership. You can offer all the tools and advice you want, but in the end there's certain personality traits needed to lead that most people don't have and never will.

Pfffffft. So long as farming is a thing, people will always be trying to spin narratives about the supposed outlandish benefits it provides in order to get *insert farming method here* gutted. Even when their own math refutes their claims. The only way you'll silence the vitriol is to start swinging the banhammer at anyone who brings this topic up.

Not very many, if how long it takes to put together a team for hardmode stuff on Everlasting is any indication. You can literally form and fully run a Synapse TF (which is hard to get anyone interested in outside it being the weekly because of its length) in less time than it takes to recruit a team for 801 or Relentless runs. (I just watched that happen a few days ago.) If Dr. Q is the weekly, you can form and run THAT mess of a taskforce in less time than the hardmode recruiter needs to get a crew rolling.

The time when I would have had any use for hard mode anything came and went over a decade ago.

The NASDORQ?

I'm fine with adding options, as long as they remain OPTIONS. A (default-off) switch to disable patrol XP for a character, which is what the OP claims to be looking for, is fine and dandy. It's the inevitable demands by Team City of Dark Souls for this to be extended to default-on for everyone that I'll have a problem with.

Why all the concern about overbuffing the worst power in the weakest control set in the game? If you're not going to give the fear effect a useful target area, what's the point of adding it at all?

Incarnate lore can go to hell. My characters have what powers they have, and the source is written in their backstory. I pick whatever origin marker is closest to that and roll. The Well doesn't get a say in any of it.

The hard numbers people are putting up in this very thread say you're full of it. The difference in inf gain per minute has been shown to be marginal, and that's at the bleeding edge. Now granted, there was a time, back on Live, when AE could actually give you an outlandish amount of goodies compared to regular stuff. But that time was several rounds of nerfs ago, both on live and HC. Now you have to optimize the everloving shit out of what you're doing to outpace regular content by what, 10-15%? And as people keep pointing out, that's still a distant second to what you can earn by fooling around at Wentworth's.

That works for non-AE enemies. But stuff in the AE lost the double-drop potential as one of several direct anti-farming nerfs the AE suffered on live, around the same time as ambushes got gutted. Frankly the only reason AE can still function as a farming tool is sheer mob density on certain maps.

Or with literally anything that's worth the code space the power takes up.

To be fair, if a tank army is following you down the road, people aren't really looking at YOU, are they?

Let's see, the only game noises I've had issues with: 1. play stupidly loud compared to the rest of the game's sounds 2. stack their effects to become even louder These two traits invariably lead to: 3. getting abused by trolls who start whinging any time someone suggests "nerfing" their audio spam Notably, this trifecta of ear-rape has only happened on two games out of the literally hundreds I've played, which means most developers, including at least one of the HC team, realize what a stupid idea it is to apply 1 or 2 to anything. Now it just remains to be seen if they follow through or give in to the whinging trolls and leave the noise pollution in place.

American ego. They can't claim it was made in the USA, so they pretend it doesn't exist.

That wasn't a valid argument when Steam's new UI was giving people migraines, and it ain't valid now either. The only other time I've had audio problems remotely like this is the train emote in World of Warcraft, which both plays considerably louder than the rest of the game and stacks. Trolls would spam it and cried up a storm when the WoW devs took steps to fix the problem. Notice the pattern?

We shall see. All I know is I'm not putting my hearing at risk to test a "fix" that may or may not actually fix anything (coughcoughMastermindscough), especially since it may still get reverted from the noise trolls bitching about it.

Foot Stomp with more than one target. You might as well set off a grenade on your desk. Howling Twilight is similarly ridiculous, even if it only hits one thing. And yeah, if you're going to zone with your pets out as a MM, you have two choices: alt-tab or suffer ear rape.

It's a subset of Team City of Dark Souls, which is itself a lot smaller than its members want you to believe.

AE farmers are the primary source for all those relatively cheap IOs on Wentworth's people use to build their characters. Kill AE, and that source dries up - and in turn, the now-nonexistent IO supply sends prices through the roof, at the same time as killing off one of the major sources of currency to pay those prices. You want IO builds (the gateway to most of the fun the game has to offer) to be out of reach of all but the richest players? This is how you do it. If you're one of those jackasses who thinks Emmert was onto something with his "players should struggle against minions" BS, that probably sounds pretty good. But you'll be enjoying your Dark Souls knockoff in a big empty, because anyone who valued their ability to solo above -1x1 will soon be gone.

Note that someone needs to actually run for office before you can vote for them. You can't hire someone that didn't apply for the job.

The "changes" don't actually change anything. Mercs still get the same powers with the same nonexistent damage, just in a different order. Again, until the raw numbers get boosted, nothing else you do matters. The onus is on the "yay" side to demonstrate something has actually been gained, and you haven't even tried. The best you can offer is to wave the holy book of "Trust the Devs" in everyone's face and demand we prove a negative.

Changing the name of the power does jack shit. It's the NUMBERS that are the problem, and the patch does nothing to address those. - Tier 1-2 pets are still worthless against anything that cons higher than yellow to the player. - Mercs still hit like wet noodles even before you consider their reliance on the most-resisted damage type in the game. MMOs are, ultimately, about numbers. Literally nothing else is relevant if the raw numbers aren't there to make it count. These patch notes are less than a joke.

The Zig is swiss-cheese regardless; given how much damage the interior maps show, it's impressive it still functions as a prison. But I stand by my point. You do NOT use non-lethal force on Nazis.