siolfir

Actually, because it cannot be used at the same time as many primary, secondary, and pool powers - which is what the complaint is actually about (not about the stealth level stacking, although that's related, is why I brought up the stealth IOs stacking stealth, and is ostensibly the reason why the powers are mutually exclusive) - it is explicitly unusable with those powers active. The fact that it costs you defense and/or resistance while in use (due to being mutually exclusive with powers that provide the defense and/or resistance) makes it objectively inferior to anyone not wearing "the devs can do no wrong" blinders. Yes, they're volunteers, but that doesn't make every decision they make above reproach. The quote you provided - which was on page 3 of a 38 page thread that had several additional patches implemented that could have easily incorporated a change to the stacking - actually uses the wording "due to the complexity of implementation and testing," but I wasn't thinking of that reply and didn't find it in that feedback thread with a quick search, so my memory probably messed it up. There was another one - apparently in another thread(?), since just finished skimming through that one - that I thought talked about how they weren't sure how they wanted the stealth radius to behave, and wasn't by Captain Powerhouse (I think it was Jimmy). But I'd rather just concede the point and say that my memory is shot than go through the hassle of trying to find a 5+ month old post to see if my memory was right about something I don't care enough about. Yay, you got me. I might have unintentionally exaggerated something on an internet forum and am too lazy to do more to follow up on it. Good job, you. Your parents must be proud. All this conversation has done is to remind me why I stopped coming to the forums for a few months. The hyperbole and fanaticism is rarely entertaining anymore. They could honestly remove the stealth radius from the power entirely (while some idiots cry about the mythical cottage rule because it used to have stealth), allow it to be used in power combinations that every other travel power in the game can be used, and the power would be more useful (and called Free Running - I did find that post where Jimmy said the stealth would likely be the differentiator between those powers). But hey, if you love it, you do you. It's a middle-ground not-really-travel-not-really-stealth power that has the restrictions of both of those categories, meaning I'll never take it with a Widow, Soldier, any character with Energy Aura, Dark Armor, Dark Miasma/Affinity, Storm Summoning, Cold Domination, Ice Control, and probably other sets I'm not thinking of off the top of my head because again, I've already put too much effort into this for a power that I could care less even exists until it gets changed to be useful.

Answer: all of them that have a Stealth IO slotted. Because every travel power that takes either Jump, Run, or Teleport sets can be used for stealth. Is it technically a separate power providing stealth because it's through an IO set bonus? Yes. Does it affect how you can use the power? No. Does it align with the pre-existing example of Super Speed? Yes. So that makes more than one data point for, and only a stupid decision that prevents you from using the power with other forms of stealth against. I'm aware I'm arguing against their definition of what a travel power is, and I'm aware that they could have removed the exclusivity (it was brought up in the focused feedback threads). They made up some excuse about how they didn't know how it should behave when there are clear examples. Except that's not what I'm doing, while you're ignoring the precedents to defend a decision to create a travel power that doesn't work as a travel power when you are using a stealth power - which happens to be the only one in the game that behaves that way.

I'm aware that they call it a travel power, but they also treat it like a primarily stealth power - because it's the only travel power that doesn't work with powers that grant stealth. Which makes it fairly useless as a travel power, since you have to have another travel power with it if you run any of a number of powersets. Thus my comment about it being a daft (aka stupid) decision. If you're going to call it a travel power, treat it like one. And not just like one when it hurts the player.

Based on how it behaves compared with other stealth-granting powers, neither is Infiltration. Travel powers that offer stealth (see: Super Speed) are not mutually exclusive with other stealth powers and the PvE stealth radius stacks. The fact that Infiltration does not behave this way is, in my opinion, completely daft. It's treated as a primary stealth power when it's inconvenient for the player (mutual exclusivity), and a primary travel power when it's inconvenient for the player (it has suppression and it replaces or is replaced by run/jump speed instead of stacking speeds).

Late to the party on this (have been off the forums for a few weeks distracted with other stuff) but the "stab someone while they're distracted by teammates" part is thematically why Stalkers get a scaling critical bonus on teams. And yes, high single target damage on Bosses/EBs is still very useful on teams that have a lot of AoE but that doesn't (always) justify leaving the previous fight to set up a couple of seconds early for the next one and is frequently ruined by the Brute or Tanker doing the same thing to gather mobs together. But all of that is part of adapting to the team dynamics rather than having a hard-and-fast "this is the only [best] way to play" mentality.

It was years ago (during the Cryptic days right after issue 7 came out), but I started out with CoV only as a new player, was usually solo or in a duo while playing a squishy (my first two characters were Corruptors), and had little trouble. The game has become much easier (albeit more complex) since then and if you're playing a Brute it will be even easier - Fury is insanely good at low levels when you're slot-starved. That said, the population is higher starting as a hero. If you want to get into teams and run through content with a group, you'll be better served to start there. If you want to go at your own pace, read the mission text, and don't mind running solo, redside is a great place to start.

I started to say Stalker's Guilde: Chance for Hide on a Dominator or Brute (since the last I knew, kMeter was the underlying stat for Domination, Fury, and Hidden status) so it would fill your Domination or Fury bar each time it triggered - of course building PermaDom alleviates most of the usefulness, but I guess you could also use it on a Sentinel to keep Opportunity active nearly all the time. The Assassin's Mark chance to recharge Build Up would be nice on a Blaster or Scrapper, too.

I've only had 3 blind invites on Homecoming, ever. All three were for my character Worst Healer Ever... a level 50 Psi/Bio Stalker.

My personal favorite is playing a Stalker at low levels (when you actually use the slow AS) and having new players follow me if I leave a bit early to pick targets for the next spawn and get in position rather than staying with the tank.

Not necessarily - you can see this behavior when you "brute-stealth" a mission: even mobs hit by a taunt aura will stop coming after you once the taunt wears off if you haven't done anything else. I'm leaning towards "high threat caused them to back away, lack of taunt led them to go back to their spawn point" as the reason but I'm operating on observations of AI behavior and assumptions, not any inside knowledge.

Ah, okay. With it lowercase and you mentioning taunt auras I thought that you were referring to the Gauntlet effect. I don't think it's a thing either, but since it's an AI behavior I guess it's possible. I would have thought that being close enough and in LOS would have them aggro even without having a taunt effect on them since from that description there weren't enough mobs left to be over the aggro cap. But then, when the taunt was broken in Fiery Aura you saw lots of mobs just run off from taking damage from Blazing Aura and then leave the fight entirely, so it might be their normal non-taunted behavior.

Punchvoke/Gauntlet can miss (mentioned earlier), but the actual power Taunt only has a to-hit check for player targets, not raid targets. You probably already know this but the wording can read as if you were talking about the power also, so I was just trying to clear up the difference between Taunt's effects: and Gauntlet's effects: before it confuses someone new.

Gauntlet (and the AoE splash taunt effect) isn't a guarantee if it's a "raid" tagged mob, while Taunt is. This has been true since before it was made into a proc, which was the conventional reason (before the -range was added) given for why Tankers and Brutes should take Taunt anyway, and why you can peel certain mobs off of them more easily by outdamaging them or applying a huge debuff. More edits: Just to attempt to be on-topic, as many have said in the thread different AVs present different challenges even at the same ruleset. I had a much more strict rule for soloing AVs when I first made a character "to solo AVs," which was my EM/Elec Brute created back in i7 before IOs were a thing, you could mail inspirations to yourself, Energize replaced Conserve Power giving Electric Armor an uninterruptable self-heal, Incarnates, and "Ye Olde" EM nerf - when AVs only spawned solo when set to max difficulty (Relentless was equivalent to +2/x1 with bosses and AVs on). The rules then were basically inspirations in your tray, no temp powers, no outside buffs, and everything else was taken care of because the game wouldn't actually let you do it. Those "rules" were because my first 50, an Ice/Rad Corruptor, was capable of soloing AVs that way (yeah, yeah, I know - a /Rad, ooh, big deal soloing AVs) as long as I wasn't mezzed and/or one-shot, and I wanted something a little sturdier to prevent the mezzed and/or one-shot part of that. Also, some mobs "con" as Hero but are Boss or EB-level - it's only in a few missions, but they exist - so it has to actually have the hit points to count. I still don't count instances of using inspirations beyond what was in your tray (and heck, even some where you only use your tray if you pre-selected them specifically for the fight), non-permanent temp powers, and Lore pets, or if you outleveled them, but if someone tells me that their character soloed an AV while using BP Lore pets I won't try to tell them they didn't, it'll just get a mental eyeroll. I've done it myself just to get the badges faster, I just don't count it as "soloing" when all I'm doing is distracting the AV from pets perfectly capable of taking out GMs during their duration.

Yes and no - it's small (1.875%) in combat. Out of combat however, the extra defense is equivalent to Weave for all but AoE, where it's 37.5% instead, which is certainly worth slotting when you want to get to a position (and maybe use an interruptible melee power) without getting hit. Which is why I said just make it a slottable inherent like Sprint and let people decide if they want to put their limited slots - which are usually at more of a premium - in it.

And Sentinels and Tankers share a 0.95 damage modifier, with Sentinels getting melee target caps (5 for cones/10 for radial) and Tankers getting ranged caps (10/16). So undoing the target cap nerf for the blast sets would get them much closer. If Hide was inherent, I would assume they would just make it a toggle. You know, like Sprint is inherent, but is a slottable toggle? There's no need to overthink it. It's not free, though - if it was inherent, it would be free, because then the secondaries could/would be the same. Now some sets roll the removed power into something else, but most don't, and Stalkers lose things in their version of the powerset, often (but admittedly not always) for the worse.

I just want to clarify - I missed the part about Bone Smasher (I edited my earlier post saying as much) but I assumed that you wanted all of the powers listed with bonuses as consumers. I don't like that the Energy Focus mechanic was added. When I provided my feedback - both before I knew what the changes were while the set was still in a closed beta, and after when it was opened up for everyone - I expressed this. But I also understood that it was going to be here to stay whether I like it or not so I wanted it to have as little impact on the set as possible, because I played it before the TF and ET nerfs and loved it then despite its flaws. Thus my response that your opinion and mine could not be farther apart. You want it to expand and touch everything; I don't consider the set that result from that to be Energy Melee - it's some twisted version with the same name that I don't want or need. I also want to never see a slow Energy Transfer animation ever again, so the more consumers that are added to the set, the more it dictates "this is how you should use your powers in this specific order." I'm also not of the opinion that stuns (it's a stun, not a hold) are not valuable, but boosting a 60% chance in a set where you're already stacked with single target stun is mostly irrelevant - you're probably going to stun the target without burning your charge of focus, so using a charge of focus to do so is just penalizing you for using a damage power in your attack chain. Going from Barrage's 30% chance to 100% and having -special and -regen takes a power people aren't using much (unless they have to) into something that people can choose to use for the special effect. That's why I suggested moving it there in the open beta feedback thread - it's a larger boost to the power and it gets a "penalty" feeling out of the standard attack chain (which uses Bone Smasher). And yes, the set is weak on AoE. It's better than it was, though, and having low-to-mid AoE is a balancing point for its great single target damage. And all of this has been said elsewhere, ad nauseum.

And since this came in while I was writing my last post... the point of Super Strength is that these aren't supposed to be considered tremendous feats of strength. They're just how strong you are naturally, so that you lifting a car is like a normal person lifting a toy. That's the argument being made for why the crash doesn't fit the theme.

Which is why the highlighted statement below is kindof silly: The set is "balanced" when based on having a permanent Build Up effect. If it was removed for a standard one, then the set would take a straight nerf. Thus, the discussion about the other powers in the set in a thread ostensibly about Rage. Among melee sets, I'll give you. Fulcrum Shift is much better at buffing damage.

The problem with the mutually-exclusive power selection option is that @Captain Powerhouse is on the record as saying that he doesn't like it and doesn't want to add any more. So I just treat it as not an option from the beginning of the discussion.

As someone who does not like the Energy Focus mechanic and never wanted it in the first place, I would not like to see these changes, and would not like to pay the price elsewhere for buffing the existing consumers. We have now each expressed our diametrically opposed opinions, each of which is as valid as the other. Since you'll never convince me that your proposal is a good idea, there's not much discussion that hasn't already been said in a variety of older, pre-EM-buff threads. At least you didn't propose adding focus consumption back to Bone Smasher after it was moved to Barrage, so running your attack chain didn't feel like a penalty if Energy Transfer misses. Edit: oops, missed the line about Bone Smasher.

But where did the orchard come from? </shitpost>

To reiterate my argument, I didn't say they were bad powers, I said that they were underperforming. The difference is that both powers - while offering the highest DPA in their respective sets - do not follow the design formulas, doing so in a manner which penalizes the player. You mentioned extended range. This is ignored in the formulas, which only care about range when it comes to cones to determine the AoE size. You mentioned secondary effects, which are also supposed to be ignored. They aren't alone, either: a lot of powersets, usually from early sets, vary from the design formulas either in positive aspects (most old DoTs got an extra 10% damage over what the formula stated they should, and Shadow Maul got extra damage beyond that and a melee cone) or negative aspects (Whirling <pick a weapon>, Whirling Hands was this way until it was adjusted as part of the EM revamp, or Knockout Blow's extra-long recharge which got inherited by Crushing Uppercut, which does even less base damage). Long story short, they made design formulas and then decided to ignore them, but based on those formulas Knockout Blow and Crushing Uppercut don't perform as well as they should, regardless of their actual performance. And outside of that, I will say that I haven't played Street Justice since live (I played one then to the mid-30s and also played it while it was in beta), but only a small part of that my distaste of how Crushing Uppercut was the only power in the set that was balanced according to the possibility of the combo level it could achieve - mostly it's because I'm "meh" on the animations. I also have a level 50 SS/Bio Brute that I usually just don't use Rage on unless I'm having trouble hitting things because even though I'd get better performance with it, the crash annoys me to the point where most of the time I would rather just not use it than have a timeout period for doing so. Thus, rebalancing Super Strength to be less dependent on Rage is something that I certainly wouldn't mind happening.

Which actually makes it worse that KOB doesn't follow their own formulas, since they based the recharge on Crushing Uppercut off of Knockout Blow (this was actually stated in the beta for StJ when people questioned why the recharge was so high), which has a longer recharge than it should. Picking a worse power - because it was balanced around the secondary effect of the set (combo level) unlike nearly every other set out there - doesn't help the case.

You've said this a couple of times, but history doesn't back you up on it. You can stack Rage with SOs and Hasten and prior to ED - before I started, but when the powerset was designed - could 6-slot recharge and have it up permanently then. If they really wanted it to not stack, they could have set it to not do so as they did with many other powers. So as much as you want to blame IOs (and as many things as you can blame them for) you're totally off base here. I'll give you Foot Stomp - it should have a 10' radius for its damage and recharge - but Knockout Blow is an underperforming power based on their own design formulas and using it as an example of why SS isn't nerfed because of Rage is disingenuous at best. It has the damage and endurance cost of a 20 second recharge power, but recharges in 25 seconds for no reason beyond "we felt like it." The only thing it has going for it is DPA, but because the recharge is longer than it should be you can't use it as often to boost the rest of the set. Speaking of DPA, that "pathetic" Haymaker would be the second or third best DPA in most of the other melee sets - it's tied with Pulverize in War Mace, both of which are just above Shockwave in Claws for Brutes and Tankers (which is ahead of the Scrapper version in damage scale/second by a decent amount); it at least follows the formula. Since they actually follow the formulas, the DPA for the rest of the set is on the low end because it's saddled with longish animations to look like you're hitting hard with recharges that mean you're not actually hitting hard. Of course, for Tankers Foot Stomp - while having the same 15' radius - doesn't get the benefit of the increased AoE sizes that Tankers now get and because of that actually ends up accidentally following the design formulas, so I guess it's only Brutes - who get the least benefit from persistent +damage bonuses - who get the benefit from it being larger than it should be. So one power on one of the ATs is better than it should be, one power on both ATs is worse, and people will somehow point to both and say, "See! You have those!"

I'm not disagreeing that it got worse with merits, but it really started before then - whether it was speedrunning the LRSF because it was the only way to get (S)HO enhancements at the time, or the "pool C recipe drop" that was put in before merits were ever a thing. Basically, as soon as the reward for doing something became more than SOs, people started speedrunning in order to farm the rewards. For me, at least, that also includes accolade badges, since many of the TFC TFs aren't exactly the most exciting and engaging content in the game. But really the original dev team was the one that decided to tie time to merit rewards when they based them off of a "20 merits = 1 hour" rule of thumb with no bonuses for difficulty, an occasional penalty for things frequently run after they set the initial rewards (*coughKHTFcough*), and beyond those occasional penalties they rarely ever revisited them after people started speedrunning things that were mostly ignored before because the merit reward was much higher than the time it took to speedrun, ignoring things that were speedrun before they set the rewards because now the reward was pathetic compared to the other options, or even after tweaks were made to things to slow down completion.