Scarlet Shocker

It's not a suggestion it's an idea open to discussions and opinions. Sorry to disappoint. I put it in GD for a reason.

Given the aggravation in a different thread regarding Group Fly from the Flight pool, it seems to me there's an argument that the issue is not just about user behaviour but also about how some of the powers work. This post will be largely centred around Group Fly but the rest of the Flight pool is somewhat underwhelming - perhaps because it's one of the original pool sets, designed for travelling and largely filler elsewise. Hover is almost always a viable power, ask any Blaster - but even that has limitations given some powers need a player to be actually on the ground to activate and so precluded by Hover unless complex macros or binds for turning Hover off, activating the actual power you want to use and then reactivating Hover. It's a bugbear that seems largely unnecessary but aside from that, Hover is probably the 2nd most popular early power pick in game after Combat Jumping. (I don't have actual numbers here so guestimating here. Open to correction as always.) Air Superiority seems like an emimently skippable power there as a filler and little else and there are many better options that would work for anyone using Hover. The only interesting ability of note is that it does -Fly but so does an Immob and most characters interested in using Hover would likely have access to such a power, so it's pretty redundant, if we want to be charitable about it. I've personally never used Group Fly - I'm aware how annoying it can be to other players and I rarely play Masterminds. Those I have played (Beasts, Demons & Thugs) tend to have sufficient mobility when travelling over distance to not need it. The big Caveat here is that I've never taken an MM on an MSR and I'm quite unlikely to. But if my understanding is correct, Group Fly is considered invaluable to MMs because it allows easy transport of pets over hazardous areas. Of itself that seems quite useful. You and your pets fly high in the sky and the bad guys don't get one over on you. But the issue is you're dragging the rest of the team around with you, whether they want it or not! That's the nub of it. The other players on your team or league have to be aware of Null the Gull and his ability to turn Fly off and to have visited them. Frankly, that is an untenable position for this power. It affects other players regardless of their own desire. It might once in the dim and distant past have had some utility but with the ability to get around our city so easily for everyone, there is no reason for it to impact other players at all. Hell, Jet Packs are now 10 an inf in game now. They literally give them away in some situations. So why isn't Group Fly now modified into affecting only the PC and her pets? I doubt that's a difficult fix. In fact it should be added to Fly, so that the PC and Pets are automatically given the power of flight and go where they want to go and nobody else has their agency affected. That makes Group Fly redundant as it should be, and we can replace it with a power somebody actually might use. In the past I advocated for a power I called Air Supremacy - a hand-clap PBAoE that did -Fly, KnockDown and Stun. Woudln't necessarily have to be high Mag but would annoy the fuck out of Skyraiders and those buggers in the Shadow Shard. You, dearest reader, may have a different idea of how to replace GF but surely a power that causes that much angst in game is way past its Best Before date and needs to go!

Warum zum Teufel benutzt du Group Fly?

Only if you say it in German

Don't be so entitled. Your time is no more valuable than the next person's. You were given a reasonable request and failed to respond in a reasonable manner. Most players have an intense dislike of group fly for many reasons listed here. You chose to use it despite being asked not to. I'm not surprised you got booted.

to be fair, there's very little good about Star Wars. Most of the stories are ripped from elsewhere - that's really obvious in IV - but it doesn't require the audience to think very much so it's popular.

"And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth's mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against a common threat...." I don't have a problem with what you've described, because fundamentally the game is a team game and is meant to be played by several people. (Remember, in Avengers, Hulk had to leave because he's OP, and MCU pulled a crappy stunt in Endgame to take him out of the equation too.) I read some Lore. I don't read it all, I wouldn't in any way consider myself an expert but I was minded to in this instance simply because the WotF story was such arsewater, and nothing I've read or seen Lore-wise has changed my opinion of it. I'm very aware I could head-canon it in a different direction but that's a poor fix at best. Such a great game, frankly, deserves better story telling. That, perhaps, is my biggest beef with it. If the game itself was mediocre and less important to me I wouldn't give a flying wossname but I do because I love the game and set high expectations of it.

I have a heuristic mnemonic I use: FUCT My characters have to be: Fun, Unique, Challenging, Team Friendly Mostly that's pretty obvious but to spell it out for anyone reading who's slightly slow it boils down to enjoyment while playing, a sense of difference to other characters in my stable, not so easy I can follow a team lead blindly mashing a few buttons and allow me to fulfil a role on a team without being too difficult or niche. If they don't pass muster by lvl 50 and don't fulfill that criteria they get deleted. If I do keep 'em (and I have a lot) then they might not always come out to play - because there are things I want to do on other toons but they will be brought out for high days, holidays, team events, leagues, etc etc. I have enough characters on most shards that I can fit in any team of most levels if need be. Some of course don't ever get forgotten. My namesake being the obvious but I'd also say I've got a handful of characters that I have done all content with almost as far as I want and now it's just tweaking (maybe to get extra inf or to afford that Proc I'm missing. ) None of those are ever "done" but equally I don't feel a huge need to "finish them" with any degree of urgency.

I wasn't advocating deleting the content from the game. If you got that impression I expressed it wrong. I'm fundamentally against content removal for any number of reasons - not the least of which is while I might hate something others might love it and given I'm not in charge of the game then I don't get to impact others' play negatively. What I would advocate is that the story is modified somewhat (retconned is the phrase all the cool kids use these days I understand) and another story of duplicity laid on top of it to explain it. (See above.) I actually think the powers and power trees in the Incarnate system works reasonably well. I have some minor issues with them but fundamentally I think they add more to the character progression than they remove. My big gripe is the story of the Well itself, but I also have huge issues with some of the IContent. TPN above is one of my big gripes but the biggest is I'm all for dramatic interludes but that took the real biscuit and for me capped off a pretty miserably written experience. Some of the content was good and well written. UG trial for example. The Lambda and BAF showed us that we could take on Praetoria and win. On the other hand I strongly dislike that you cannot join the Loyalists at the end of the Praetorian arc. Even if you loathe Cole and what he turns out to be, there is a compelling case that you might believe after all you've seen that his ultimate goal was not as misguided as first appears. That makes no logical sense and the Resistance is even worse. I must admit I was initially resistant (no pun intended) to the increase in power levels since they might ruin existing content but that balance is reasonably well dealt with and the game was crying out for some further power progression that wasn't simply an additional 30 levels bolted on at the end of your first 50. (One of the things I truly loved about The Secret World was its lack of levels - your character progression was amazing there even with the clunkiness of the power wheels and other game issues. But it did take a bit to get your head around but not poorly so.) So... TL;DR - no don't scrap it. Do something good with it. The cake has been made, but is singed around the edges and raw in the middle. That's not an insuperable challenge with a bit of imagination and quality writing.

Oh I definitely have some ideas... it would obviously involve Nemesis, who seems to imagine himself the greatest chess player without recognising his limitations. I think I recall Positron, in an AMA once saying that Lady Gray was a sleeper agent. I suspect he was at best being mischievous with that, but I would probably riff on that a little too. It'd probably be based around Mender Silos fabricating this entire tall tale around Ouroboros at the end of the universe, and every time a player character uses it to get from place to place through time a tiny tiny part of their power is siphoned off to his giant temporal space battery which he is using in his war against the Kheldians. He's at war with them because in their home world they are guarding a great and powerful force and bits of that force have dribbled into Primal Earth due to their dealings with us. So he's trying to steal it for himself and take over the universe. Oh and the Kheldian in the Ouro. Twilights Son? He's either very very stupid, a traitor or a simulacrum, whichever you please. And the bit where you beat up the bad guys in the crashed Ouroboros? Those "bad guys" had rumbled him and had almost managed to beat him if it wasn't for us pesky kids... so it becomes kinda circular but hopefully a bit more interesting, gives us a bit more control of our own destiny and I hope perhaps a little more amusing.

Fair point. I remember reading the comics - and I think there Positron tells someone to "grab yourself an enhancement on the way out!" To me that implies they are a physical thing - but exactly what they are is ephemeral at the same time, so yeah... But we also know that Mender Silos and his crew of ne'er do-wells, with a very very dodgy past, are less than straight with us poor saps who they are recruiting for a battle at the end of time. (Something I cannot decide is more influenced by Michael Moorcock or Douglas Adams.) It would be relatively easy to say "they're lying to you" and turn that into a thing - they say it's the Well, Posi couldn't disprove that, but then it turns out to be something else entirely (Or perhaps it is a kind of well but not how they described.) Now we definitely know where your dodgy threads come from! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Jesting aside I think the whole concept of Enhancements is one of the game's strengths. It's not tied to gear, and it allows extreme flexibility - especially with ED* which kind of forces it. But that made the playing experience so much better than immediately going after the next bit of +X gear you need to "complete" your build. Aside from your deliberate typo which puts a very different slant on everything in game - I kind of agree. I spent my first decade not looking under the hood to see how the game worked, just to keep the freshness and enjoyment going for as long as possible - and that worked, by and large. But in any world, you would always have someone curious enough to keep behind the curtain and wonder what that strange bald man is doing wiggling those controls. Conclusion: I think there's more that can be done with the story, and make it interesting as well as exciting - but it would take some skill and craft to do so and probably conflicts terribly with all the plans that the Devs currently have. And even if it didn't, I doubt they'd tell us 😀 *I know, heresy, right? 🤪

Ducking gifs sounds ... wrong I lolled!

Squirrel Girl defeated Dr Doom without any weird hokey pokey. Never forget that! That is one of my bugbears with the end game content. To me, it seemed that when Matt Miller became Lead Dev the whole end-game story became a Positron wank-fest and that sucked. Bigly. The warning signs were there on the ITF of course. I deleted the spoiler here in case it got revealed but that sounds bloody awful and would almost certainly killed the game. I have never heard or read this but if true, I'm almost glad that the game got cancelled when it did and I've never imagined myself saying that.

Those of you who pay any attention to how I feel about Incarnates know how much I hate the sloppy writing and story. I don't hate the principle of getting more power, becoming stronger or generally improving what my character does as a hero (or villain) but how poorly that story was bolted on to the game as a "that'll give them end game, screw making it make sense." It was poorly conceived, and poorly executed and gave us dross like TPN where a civilian can throw a rock at a super-powerful entity and nail them because handwave. It delves shallowly into ancient Greek mythos and comes up wanting. In my opinion, it fails at almost every single turn... and yet despite it's best (worst) efforts, the actual power progression isn't bad. The Incarnate power trees and abilities are mostly ok (except Lore which is horrific.) It does give your character power and it does actually feel like you've earned something. BUT... if you read the story, the Well of the Furies acknowledges power and gifts itself to those who show it. But you'll never be as powerful as the signature characters, and they don't show any evidence of the Well blessing them. So what is it doing? I don't trust the "Well of the Furies" for so many many reasons - not the least of which is that nobody is able to tell us what it is. Which in itself is stupid considering that in Paragon, the Rogue Isles and Praetoria we have access to amazing technicians, scientists, magicians and sensei who could guide and help us mere player characters in checking out what it is. Frankly the whole story stopped me reading the game lore because it's so badly broken at this point. Why is it that this mysterious power will gift itself to you but you still can't beat up your trainer? Your trainer should, logically be the one to receive the benefits of WotF. Even low level signature characters such as Bobcat need an army of Incarnate imbued folk to slap her down - and the Hamidon has them all beat so why doesn't the Well gve Hami its power then taking over the whole game world? Odysseus seems to get a slice of it, and even Positron gets more than his fair share but you can rip that from under his nose and steal the Flames of Prometheus. It seems so fractured that the Well can do whatever it likes and holds to no game logic or semblance of reason. Is it too late to scrub it from the game and come up with something that makes sense in terms of game lore and human logic?

"Hell is other people" Jean-Paul Sartre

I've seen your wardrobe. I think most of your threads need reporting! 🤣

You must have a minimum of... 5 pool slots I believe and a maximum of 20. I fiddled around wtih Mids last night and actually taking 20 pool powers is very difficult. I don't even think it's permissible. @Andreah makes a good point about the number of combos but for most EPs there are 10 options. (MM get 9 for some reason. Devs hate MMs)

Thinking aloud here: We need to establish the definitive rules here: What is the minimum number of pool powers and/or sets we MUST pick... I think I'm right in believing we don't have to pick an EP (EPicatron) if we don't wish. That way we can at least get a baseline for the non V/EAT ATs

I almost hate you (no I truly do not! 😃 ) but you are saved by the fact that I was only interested in powers. If you add slotting to the mix that would mean that almost every power taken could be multiplied by 6. It would be a large number.

I think Zem is closest here. I may not be right but I guess one thing I haven't factored in is the rules about the number of pool powers - and indeed the variance of them - and the Patrons

I was trying to discover what are the maximum number of power variants in the game, across all ATs and powers: In other words, what is the maximum possible PCs you could build, at level 50 where no two characters had exactly the same power sets. Every PC would be different even if by a magnitude of just one turns out to be pretty bloody difficult!

He's off elsewhere making other great achievements. In fact you might say he's being an Owling Success! /em rimshot

you have 10 pools with five powers each. So that's a potential choice of 50. Granted once a pool is chosen you are limited to that (now you've got me thinking about multiple builds) but you have a potential 50 powers to choose from across the board. I am not so good at maths that I can calculate how to account for powers that are predicated on previous selections. But yes there's an anomaly there. I've not counted the individual powers in the primary secondary pools so my final tally won't add up. You have embarrassed me @Snarky /me runs off to find holy water, silver bullets, garlic and crosses

I hadn't considered illegal combos - I just took the available data from HC Wiki and that (I presume) doesn't permit illegal combos. Source: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Archetypes I went through each AT, counted up available combos etc I am aware there are possibly glaring errors and I won't be offended if anyone finds and corrects. VEATs still need work. I believe EATs (PB/WS) are pretty close now.

My first reaction to this was akin to Foxtrot Oscar but that is yet another order of magnitude. I would like to do it but I think Lore would likely make me cry 🤣 To be serious, it would be worth doing.