siolfir

And none of them should be, which is why I had already planned on hiding posts (after a PM to the person they were addressing) when I was beat to it by a GM. All of those discussions should be taken elsewhere instead of cluttering a "focused feedback" thread.

For all of the "squishies shouldn't get full-time mez protection because of all of the other things they get for being squishy" talk, I'd like to point out that RoP is a build decision that locks you out of other choices and doesn't provide full-time protection even at the longer duration. APP Indomitable Will provides 90 seconds of mez protection on a 360 base recharge instead of 600 seconds, but I guess it's fine because it's only available at level 35 with no prerequisites and "only" provides 22.5% psi defense? Other actually full-time "squishy" options are perma-Dom, Sonic Resonance, Force Fields, Traps, and Electrical Affinity. Trick Arrow also gets mez protection, Radiation Emission can significantly reduce duration for themselves (permanently at high recharge), and Blasters can ignore mez for their low-tier powers. Why shouldn't squishies who heavily invest in a pool get a nice uptime on RoP, given the full-time options available to many other "squishy" sets?

Pure speculation on this, but I would imagine that since it would have to happen during the last mission that you could have everyone log off to reset the mission (much like when you attempt to change difficulty) and that it would go to the new leader after the mission is reset. The worst case scenario, where someone who gets the Power of Black Scorpion disconnects (leader or no) and nobody is there to replace it, happens already and you'd be in the same situation, it's just that since it happens based on AT it could happen at any point in the SF.

After reading the writeup by @Saikochoro I think that the hidden reason for the RoP nerf is because the devs are giving us what we constantly ask for. It's another regen nerf! Seriously, appreciate the detailed writeup, and I agree with everything said in the points of discussion at the end of the post. Unfortunately, I also agree with the post by @ForeverLaxx that this is essentially a done deal. Whether or not a power is over-tuned is a matter of opinion. In my opinion, RoP was not, but my opinion - and the opinions of nearly everyone who has posted in this thread - do not matter, and we're not here to try to convince any of the players in the thread to change their opinion. What matters is the devs' opinion, and they haven't stated one explicitly - the stated reason for the change was "to match the other Origin pool tier 5 powers," not because "it was overperforming." Some can - and have - argued that since it provides resistance when used while already mezzed that it was either a lateral move or a buff despite the reduced uptime (I'm not one of those). So it's either that the devs felt that it's easier to adjust one power than two others to equalize durations, or they secretly don't like the uptime and want to reduce it, but didn't want to flat out state that. Or they just wanted to nerf regen, and collateral damage was acceptable. 😋

I got that, but there have been enough people posting about how they were confused about why power A was becoming power B and what that means and how useful that is and whether or not new Fly is old Fly + old Afterburner, etc. in the other thread, so I wanted to try to provide an explanation in this thread to attempt to head it off here.

Correct. And to provide feedback, which has been done. It's also explicitly not to try to change others' opinions.

Eh... not really? I apologize for getting into semantics but the phrasing used in the patch notes is what was being complained about, so it almost has to go into semantics with blanket statements like this. In this context, having seen the development of all of the back-and-forth and it almost exclusively being about flight speed, it's correct enough, but it's not factually correct for someone just coming into the discussion to get the right idea. The verbiage in the patch notes is correct in that it states that "This increased cap is the equivalent of fully slotting the old version of Afterburner" (emphasis mine). But that was the only part of Afterburner that was migrated to Fly. The defense and flight control remain in Evasive Maneuvers, so if you want those parts as well you don't actually get everything that a maxed out Afterburner gave you. In addition, other benefits that it didn't have before (as old Afterburner) were added, like the flight speed boost, knockback resistance and immobilize protection. New Fly isn't equivalent to old Fly + old Afterburner. It's faster than old Fly, because the flight speed cap is higher and old Fly just flatlined against the cap all the time. Evasive Maneuvers isn't equivalent to old Afterburner. It doesn't adjust the flight speed cap, - it doesn't need to, because that's built into Fly now - but it does more things (+flyspeed, KB resistance, immob protection) and lets you do more things while it's active because it's no longer Only Affecting Self. And the new Afterburner is behaving the way you would expect something named Afterburner to behave - a short-term, unsustainable boost to flight speed (and the flight speed cap).

Slot investment and enhancement choices are the new choice. It's no more or less homogenous this way. Previously having Fly by itself was capped, and you could raise the cap by slotting Afterburner, which would change the speed that you can fly at. Now you can slot Fly to change the speed that you can fly at. What a novel concept, slotting the power you're trying to improve in order to get more effect out of it.

Honestly I would say a melee-focused Widow, plus or minus the dart attacks, is as close as Spines is given all the toxic DoT (and -regen from the darts). I also agree that both seem more physical, but really "Poison Melee" means you're going to have to have some way to inject the venom (because you eat poison) so there has to be at least something, and the spines, widow blades, and darts certainly do that.

If the leader was just being a tool about it, this is what I would've just suggested to everyone in the team. "Hey, I'm dropping. Anyone who wants to restart at (chosen difficulty) instead of slogging through this, you're welcome to join me." The fact that you don't have to have a minimum number of people for TFs is great and makes this possible: even if nobody follows you can still start one and finish before the control freak.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the mission system would support that. Since the only way to get the badges in mayhems and safeguards is through a door mission, and you wouldn't be able to set the tip mission as the active mission while inside the mission (there's already a mission set) or outside of the mission (the badge isn't in the zone). There might be a workaround if it could set a waypoint as an objective, though?

I have never felt that Rune of Protection is overtuned. I did think it was good enough to be tempting, but ultimately not worth the cost because of how many sacrifices in my build it would require. Edit to add: and that was when I thought that the resistance was supposed to turn on all the time when it was clicked; obviously I never kept it long enough to realize that it wasn't doing that if you used it while mezzed, so the buff that this patch provides is honestly just getting it to where I wouldn't consider it "broken". This is, in my opinion, a great balancing point. Tempting, but requiring sacrifices. That's how the tier 5 pool powers should be. Something to break up "I'll just take the Leaping, Speed, Leadership, and Fighting again because those powers are always available and provide small but stacking benefits."

Yeah, that was brought up and disproven pages ago and got buried under the rest of the back-and-forth. It doesn't seem to be the intent as much as it was an artifact of cleaning up the Flight speed buffs that you saw: note that on live you have four flight speed buffs from Fly including a negative one, and only one flight speed buff on beta. After everything is said and done, Fly on beta is still faster than Fly on live (due to the unmodified cap on live) and Fly + Evasive on beta is faster than Fly + Afterburner on live. So the same investment on powers nets you more speed.

IIRC when the Blessing of the Zephyr set came out they said it wasn't allowed in Sprint because - at the time - the Prestige Sprints were a veteran reward, and having them slottable there would provide a lot of places for people to drop -KB IOs without a power/slot cost based purely on their veteran status. I personally think it was a good decision for the given reason, although the point is moot now that anyone can get them.

As mentioned earlier some of the power customization options for water blast allow a variety of fluids (blood, oil, someone had beer, etc) and the hand motions and particle effects could represent more than just gathering and throwing water. The damage types are pretty generic, too (smashing, cold, and fire). In addition Energy Manipulation is probably the closest to a pure ranged Blaster secondary since you can ignore Power Thrust and take Build Up, Energize, Power Boost, and Boost Range and then skip the rest of the secondary while still getting good sustain and utility powers. And if something is getting close... well, you had to take Power Thrust anyway, may as well use it. If nothing else, mess with a WB/EM Blaster in the character creator and see if you can get something you like?

My personal favorite case for anyone who complains about Stalkers being squishy is that it took until I was finally 2-shot by a two "lucky" hits in a row to notice that I had been tanking a level 54(+3) AV for over 4 minutes on my level 50 Psi/Bio Stalker - who had just hit 50 during the arc and so had no level shifts or incarnate powers. I hadn't ever run the arc before and thought that it was just another one of those cases where the psi resistance was off the charts when my attacks weren't doing anything and the Dominator (who was 50+3 since it was incarnate content) was whittling them down. Once I actually saw that I was -7 I swapped to my Brute (50+3) and the fight was suddenly a lot easier. Because yes, the purple patch gets ugly past +5.

This. Just by playing as a 50, especially if you switch characters after you get one, will get you all the catalysts you need and then some without ever purchasing any. Boosters you have to buy.

Defense Debuff is schedule A, To Hit Debuff is schedule B (I did use the word usually, to hit's an exception).

Off-topic for this thread, so this whole section might get purged, but typically the numbers are higher for debuffs and debuffs usually use schedule A enhancements (+33% even-con SO) while buffs use schedule B (+20% even-con SO). I don't know if it was ever specifically stated instead of just assumed, but the idea was that the numbers are higher because they have to be applied and are resisted, which has already been brought up.

I'm not arguing that the concern was one that I shared - reading the remainder of my post would clearly explain that I feel that the lines are already pretty hopelessly blurred - but I was trying to express what I feel the concern was: they don't want them further blurred.

Honestly, that ship sailed a long time ago with something as seemingly benign as creating new ATs that fill the same team roles for City of Villains, powerset proliferation (due to the way it was handled where minimal changes were made but "everything should be copied"), and Incarnate abilities put a pretty sturdy nail in the coffin. At high levels the only real distinction between ATs is purely AT modifiers and inherents because everyone gets some form of armor against at the bare minimum S/L, ranged single-target and AoE attacks, at least one nuke, an option to pick up control powers, and can get permanent mez protection at the expense of having a choice in Incarnate Destiny. On a team, you can receive buffs to have all of those options much earlier, so powers like Rune of Protection which can't be made permanent only offer a "panic button" utility. Since you can combine inspirations, it's pretty easy to get a 30-90 second duration mez protection without limiting your power pool choices so it acting like a medium orange is "meh" and not worth having to take Mystic Flight for travel and pick up a power that I have to explicitly find reasons to want to use. I even have characters that took Sorcery for concept reasons and will use Arcane Bolt and Enflame, but skipped RoP because it offered nothing to them (a Plant/Kin Controller who still has Sorcery but not RoP and a Mind/Dark Dominator who originally took it and ditched it in a respec that got rid of the pool entirely). Since this was posted while I was writing this, I'll bite: I think the concern was that having a good melee attack would make your Defender more like your Stalker instead of the other way around, and having good pool ranged attacks (Arcane Bolt or Toxic Dart, for example) would make your Stalker more like your Defender.

Since mine was one of the posts that got nuked, I repost a summary of the relevant portion of it, knowing full well that the same complaint has already been heard and likely nothing will come of it: I dislike the reduced duration of Rune of Protection. I already felt that the investment in power selection and slots to get a decent uptime and effect was insufficient even at a duration 50% greater than the beta version, and don't even consider the 60 second options in the other pools due to their limited uptime. I would prefer a normalization in the opposite direction, where the 60 second duration powers in the other origin pools is adjusted to 90 seconds, because as it is on beta the powers may as well not exist for me and will not end up in any of my builds. If this is due to their relative strength and uptime compared to various armor tier 9s, then adjust the tier 9s as has been asked many, many, many times before.

As @Faultline and @Max Firepower have brought up some of the examples I was going to use that are already in-game which use mutually exclusive powers (which @Captain Powerhouse has stated in the past he does not like), I'll just point out that the snipes, Assassin's Strikes, and Titan Weapons use a form of this by redirecting to other powers as well. One thing that hurts the case is that the seemingly preferred way (conditional power redirects) uses one set of slots for any powers, and you would have IO slotting issues no matter how you tried redirecting there as some sets wouldn't apply when one is PBAoE and the other is TAoE. As for balance of ranged vs PBAoE nukes and their respective damage and/or recharges, it's all made up and arbitrary at that point since they aren't following the design formulas which don't differentiate between a melee or ranged attack, and arbitrary rules can be changed arbitrarily.

Evasive Maneuvers takes the same sets as (live) Afterburner, and Infiltration still takes Defense sets so would take whatever is slotted in Invisibility; which is the long way of saying I think they already thought of that. One thing that might have been missed is this post here, talking about how the defense will be adjusted in an upcoming patch: This would, I believe, alleviate your concern?

Wow, my last post was messed up by somehow getting a strikethrough font selection which couldn't be cleared, so I'll just summarize: Stop arguing with other posters about their opinions; they are entitled to them. Conversely, if you have already posted your concerns for the devs to read, stop arguing with those who disgree, There is almost as much noise - if not more - as the EM feedback thread from people wanting perma-fast-ET about the flight speed cap, with what is likely the same resolution, and @Jimmy has already stated that part of the changes was to align travel power speeds in the order the dev team believes that they should be, so if that's your complain you have been heard and answered. Just because you don't like the answer (as I wasn't happy about the variable speed ET) doesn't provide justification to flood the thread with so much noise that it's impossible to filter out any other concerns others may have.