siolfir

To be fair, those are usually two different groups of people. Not always, but usually. But I couldn't agree more with this part:

If they're on the same team, sure.

They do, yes - but the -perception is what allowed you to sneak by them. As @Doomguide2005 said, you just need to be able to get close enough to apply the -perception. But even being at the PvE stealth cap won't let you sneak by them without the -perception, which is why I specifically said they ignore stealth. Snipers don't have any particular ability to bypass stealth, they just have a really high perception radius.

With the change to Stealth in page 2, you don't really need the stealth IO, although you might still want it for Infiltration because the stealth doesn't stack with other sources like Super Speed's 35' PvE stealth does. Old Stealth and current Infiltration was 35', the stealth IO adds another 30' to that for 65'. The new Stealth power has 55' of stealth, which is what the old Invisibility power had. Unless a mob has a +perception power or has a special classification, they have a perception radius between 45' and 54'. Note that Stalkers' Hide is 150' and Superior Invisibility is 200' to deal with snipers and their 149' of perception, and some mobs just ignore any level of stealth entirely (Rikti drones and Knives of Artemis, for example). So just running Stealth, you can walk up to a most mobs and not be seen, and adding the IO doesn't change classifications since it's not enough to get past the 100' threshold for turrets and GMs: it just starts canceling +perception powers for the mobs with a 54' perception radius. Edit: and @Psyonico had a shorter reply while I was writing mine. Oh well, at least I provided some numbers a link to look mob perception numbers up.

And when there are two Brutes and a Scrapper all loaded with set bonuses and the leader says "we need a tank," you know that you should find someone else to play with.

It's the Midnighter access arc, but in reality you don't need to have access before level 35. And now you can get it just for snagging an exploration badge.

First, I usually skip the mission. Not because it's hard but because I just don't want to do it; if I run this arc it's because I'm short-cutting getting the alpha slot, not because it's a great work that everyone should run. But, if I am running the mission, I just run through to the end, skipping mobs along the way and fight both EBs at once, because the aggro cap exists and you can, even if there are a ton of Rikti attacking you while you're talking with the Honoree after he turns blue. It's not like inspirations don't exist.

I agree that they're really not in a bad spot, but I think part of the issue is that there is far less reliance on control in teams (due to easily available IOs leading to much higher defense and resistance numbers) and they do good damage but not great damage, which is the only other thing they bring to the table. And even that doesn't have anything to do with them having the fewest powerset combinations, which was the point of the thread (and one that I agree with).

I hated patch powers until I started binding them, but even before powexeclocation target - which @KaoticKarl covered just above this - I used binds for (shift|ctrl|alt)+lbutton for them to place them. Even if you do make the target binds, which I recommend, you still might like to be able to place them without a target: for example, when the mobs are spread around without one in the center. Just a quick sample would be something like: bind shift+lbutton powexecname Ice Storm bind alt+lbutton powexecname Blizzard Then shift-clicking a location would drop an Ice Storm there, and alt-clicking drops a Blizzard. Note that I still usually use the powexeclocation target binds, too - most of the time it's not worth looking for the mouse cursor - but these do allow for some targeting freedom.

So you're counting the -regen in the damage numbers?

It would be a huge uproar and so probably won't ever happen but honestly I think they should swap the recharge for damage in one of the ATO sets for each AT; then you'd have one for powers that need recharge (AoE controls) and one for powers that recharge fast enough already and you just want the set bonuses and some damage slotting. Whichever set you remove the recharge from gets an indirect buff to it's proc rate due to the PPM formula, and then you could open some Assault powers to take the Dominator ATOs and just trust the person to not be an idiot and slot the non-damaging set in Blaze.

That was quick. 🙂 Can't say that I'm surprised about the change to Arcane Bolt given how many times it was brought up in the feedback thread.

Just gonna drop this here...

So now that the Stalker tangent has gone completely off the rails, maybe it should be continued in its own thread? I'm guilty of expanding on it, too, but I can see that discussion, whether restricted to Stalkers or expanded on the changes to "modernize" the game, being a lengthy and potentially heated thread in its own right.

Eh, I think it had more to do with how long it took to build attack chains because of how the primaries were set up, combined with having an interruptible attack at level 6 that took an excessive amount of endurance to do scale 1 damage unless you were hidden, and then it would do as much damage as all of your other attacks (usually until level 26) put together, but recharged slowly and Placate recharged even slower. So people learned that "hit, run, and re-hide" was effective early when solo, and many (most?) tried to continue that as much as possible rather than adapting to "hit and scrap" once they could actually have an attack chain. The countdown to rehide was also lowered in one of the earlier buffs for Stalkers, they used to have to wait 10 seconds for hidden status to come back. So combine the players who think that hitting one attack every 8-10 seconds and running away after doing so until hidden status came back was the "unique AT playstyle" with the fact that even if they sat there and scrapped it out that they were still doing less damage than the other melee option(s) because their damage modifier was even lower then, and they had fewer hit points than any other melee AT, and they give up powers in their primary and secondary for their inherent while having worse performance, and you can start to see why the AT might have had a bad reputation from people who cared at all about performance. As for being a hit and run AT in PvP - so is everything with mobility. The difference is that ranged ATs are also capable of attacking while they run.

Eh. The 20% critical chance for held/sleeping enemies was taken away in PvE (it's still there in PvP) but the scaling out-of-hide critical chance was added (they weren't there originally). So based on the discussions from the cottage rule thread it was really converted to a sometimes-lower, sometimes-higher chance that can affect any enemy rather than removed entirely (insert eyeroll here).

Radios were new to heroes in issue 8 (as opposed to paper missions being part of CoV from its inception because that's how contacts were unlocked after Mercy Island), so someone who played a hero in i7 still would've had to wait for them.

I take it you also have a problem with Ice? I mean, if I were making assumptions about it I would say that it's because the (good) AoEs are all rain powers, but it will beat Electric for ranged single target damage for certain, and Blizzard is also a ranged nuke.

The fake-Hide effect is separate, though - it's part of the Placate power, but not part of the placate status. You probably already know this, but this is to prevent people from coming in and thinking that Ninjitsu Stalkers get an extra hidden critical from Smoke Flash, which was a common misconception on the original forums. @oedipus_tex, I've also seen the +300%/+400% as an expression of magnitude in taunt effects, so it makes sense it would be represented similarly given that it's the inverted effect: instead of "hit only me" it's "hit anyone but me." But unlike taunt, which also has a threat multiplier which affects the normal enemy targeting, placate needs to overcome the target's protection. This means that Placate, the power, doesn't placate Elite Bosses because it's only mag 4, and Smoke Flash doesn't placate bosses because it's only mag 3.

Echoing what @EmperorSteele said, you can try to separate them and take them out one at a time when underleveled. In the original version they were hard-set to level 54 and pre-IOs that was (one of) the common strategies, with the other being a zerg rush with Warburg nukes and/or Shivan shards, often using stacked Vengeance at the beginning of the fight if the nukes were lacking. Set bonuses and the extra level shift from alpha combined with lowering the level on the Phalanx made this a fairly standard fight, but the purple patch is still going to hurt you when you're going up against +6s. It could be a fun challenge if you separate them, though - my first 50 (Ice/Rad Corruptor) hit level 50 during a LRSF while fighting them at +5.

City of Villains was sold as a standalone expansion that you did not need City of Heroes to play, so you could just as easily say it was originally developed with Villains. If you only had City of Heroes you couldn't even make a villain until a later patch (issue 8?) merged the games regardless of which box you originally bought. To the OP, Vigilante and Rogue were added during the Going Rogue expansion, which also introduced the four Praetorian factions, the tip missions, and the rest of the alignment system. Prior to that it was just hero if you started in Paragon City and villain if you started in the Rogue Isles, and you could only play ATs that matched the alignment of the box that they originally appeared in: Blasters, Controllers, Defenders, Peacebringers, Scrappers, Tankers, and Warshades were only available to heroes, while Arachnos Soldiers, Brutes, Corruptors, Dominators, Masterminds, Stalkers, and Widows were only available to villains. The villain population was higher then because people wanting to play those ATs had to play villain or co-op content, but it never was able to catch up to City of Heroes having a 6 issue head start in population, and a large chunk of people wanting to play the "good guy" caused the population to dip once they were able to take those characters to Paragon City (and even later start as heroes with CoH: Freedom), which also caused people who just wanted to team to follow... exacerbating the problem further.

You probably think that I'm probably one of those "defenders" of new EM that you're talking about based on my comments in this thread, but I actually completely agree with everything in the rest of the paragraph, and said as much in several threads, including the focused feedback thread. My defense of it here is simply acknowledging that if you buy into the slightly changed playstyle that the changes enforce, it really is better in pretty much every situation. But yes, it changes how the set is played (much like the original nerf did, which caused me to shelve my main for years). To address the highlighted part, it wasn't my intention to say that it wouldn't require changes in how you played to get the same performance - in my case, I'd have to actually take Barrage, since I never took it (or Stun beyond a pre-i13 PvP build on the old test server) before, because I could reliably stun multiple targets with Bone Smasher, Energy Transfer, and Total Focus - and what wasn't stunned was killed fast enough it didn't need to be. I was just saying that with tweaks to how you play you were as capable as you were before. I also would've supported a Thunder Strike-like AoE in Stun rather than a cone, with more damage and a guaranteed stun on the primary target - which was brought up as an option for Power Crash also during the feedback thread IIRC - but to be honest that's just ambivalence about it since the set has lots of stun everywhere. As far as the rest of the buffs you mention... the Stalker changes were already live when the shutdown was announced and the Blaster changes were in beta - the current dev staff had little to do with those. Tankers can be put down as a Homecoming change and while there were several people questioning it, mostly anyone complaining about them during the feedback thread was pegged as a "whiny Brute player" upset that Tankers were getting competitive damage, regardless of the reason they might oppose the changes. The exceptions to that characterization were the people wanting no aggro cap, or the ones who insisted that Tankers should keep Bruising (often in more attacks). So those changes either aren't specific to Homecoming because they were from Paragon or were contested - Tankers would be doing more damage at the cap than Blasters if the original set of changes went in (it wasn't until that was pointed out in the feedback thread that the cap was reduced to 500%... and the Brute cap was lowered again). As far as casualization... yes, I agree there. But there are differing opinions as to whether that's a good or bad thing: most of the people who played a lot 10-15 years ago have more going on and less time to play.

I never said it wasn't. What I said was that two mag 3 guaranteed stuns is now possible in less total animation time using Total Focus then Barrage than it was with Stun then Total Focus. And unless you were talking really old Energy Melee, your "Stun one, TF another, stun a 3rd with ET" pattern you described - using the long animation for ET - can be done with TF, Barrage, and ET (which never had a guaranteed stun) for the same stun magnitude and chances to the same number of targets. As for concentrating damage on the more resilient foes, if you always took Barrage and Energy Punch and Stun then you can use Power Crash (which replaced Stun) to add more damage than Stun did and possibly hit other mobs as well. There really isn't a situation that got numerically worse than it was just prior to the patch, it's just that they almost always require Total Focus now. I also haven't made an EM since the beta, because I didn't want everything gated through TF, but I am willing to acknowledge that I didn't lose anything that I could do immediately prior to it going live - even as I call it a cottage rule violation for breaking IO slotting. Now, pre-original nerf when Total Focus had a mag 4 stun and ET was always fast? Yeah, there are a few things you could do there that you can't now, most of them involving ET being available immediately and Total Focus being a one-shot stun on bosses.

Fair enough; I hadn't tried that specifically and was almost positive that the automatic introduction didn't happen until you trained (could be mandela effect going on here, I don't remember seeing the popup after exiting a mission). The last few times I worried about Patron powers I was able to get the badge before level 30 by tagging along on someone else's mission, then picked up the mission to hold for the next alt (repeat as needed).

It's the same animation, just without the slow mo replay effect that stretches it out. As for the "hard data"... Old animation: 3.3 seconds, damage hits at 2.3 seconds. New animation: 2.53 seconds, damage hits at 1.767 seconds.