WumpusRat

Rage is also the power that brings Super Strength up to parity with the rest of the sets. Without Rage, Super Strength does less damage (both DPS and DPA) than any other set. It has fewer attacks, longer animations, and lower base damage. Personally, I'd say just make it not stack and get rid of the crash. Done.

The problem is that if you make it a toggle like that, you're essentially giving necromancy a permanent version of gang war. Imagine a necro who also had group buffs for his pets with no real cooldown, like from thermal, sonic, cold, force field, etc. Those little temporary zombies become extremely durable, as well as gaining all the benefits of the various set IO auras. The more you kill, the faster you kill, and it feeds on itself. A necro would turn into a giant army of zombies flying through missions destroying everything in their path. You could just leave it at +0/8, and the moment you started the ball rolling, it wouldn't stop. It would be amusing to test it, but I have a feeling it would be quite overpowered.

I don't mind the animation of it, but yeah, I was looking forward to it specifically to drop Jab off my SS tankers as well. It's just a garbage power in general, especially with bruising gone.

This seems absurdly powerful to me, to be honest. Like, far too powerful.

The zombies and grave knights are primarily melee pets, so they'll attempt to stick to melee. Sometimes the grave knights will glitch out and just spam ranged attacks though, which is annoying, because it severely reduces their dps. The lich is a purely ranged combatant, who will use dark blast, torrent, life drain (they all have that with full upgrades), fearsome stare, and petrifying gaze. He's primarily a debuffer/cc'er rather than a damage dealer, though is damage isn't completely useless. I have a necro/nature that I was playing around with on pineapple, and it works pretty well. You have to stay mobile and jump around using your cone heal quite a bit, but between that, the aoe healing toggle, life drains from the pets and the nature hold-aura, the pets become incredibly durable. I was running against +2/8 council and got a double pull, and managed to get through it with only losing 2 zombies.

Ninjas aren't pure melee though, which was his question. The jounin and genin both have quite a few ranged attacks. And the Oni is mostly ranged.

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/carrot-pizza-with-fontina-and-red-onion-56389448 Note, I'm not endorsing it. Just saying it's out there. :)

I'd almost like to see opportunity work similarly to a "ranged fury" mechanic, divorcing it from the binary all-or-nothing that it's at presently, as well as tying it so tightly to the tier-1/2 blasts. Perhaps on less of a granular scale, and more of a plateau system. 0-20 opportunity: no bonus 21-40 opportunity: +damage, minor heal/end recovery 41-60 opportunity: +damage, bonus -res, minor heal/end recovery 61-80 opportunity: +damage, bonus -res, minor heal/end recovery, +accuracy 81+ opportunity: bonuses now become group-wide I'm not going to put out any actual numbers for the various bonuses, since that could be jiggered with to find a good balance point. But it would allow for sentinels to be more flexible with their opportunity when solo, and allow them to provide a useful buff for their team as well, giving people a reason to say "oh good, we have a sentinel."

I don't think there's an alternate for hurl. I mean, I'd love to grab a car and chuck it at someone, but eh! Plus it's a fairly long animation for a moderate-damage power. The reason I use boxing is to have a cheap attack that's always ready to go, and can finish off low-health mobs without burning a bigger attack. Boxing is basically a higher-damage version of jab, and has a better chance to stun. Especially since taking kick and cross punch increase the damage by 30%. So it's a decent filler attack, at least imo. Without hurl, there's only 4 single-target attacks in SS, and since I skipped jab, that only leaves 3. I'm debating moving the slots over to kick, but I like the faster animation that boxing has. So I'm not sure. And yeah, I really like how cross punch feels with the rest of the SS moves. You just haul back and punch a bunch of guys in an arc, which feels very super strength-y to me. Especially since it can knock them down, or occasionally send them flying. Definitely adds some much-needed aoe to my kit.

I use boxing on my SS/Will brute. I have it 4-slotted with kinetic combat for the smash/lethal defense bonus, and to boost cross punch's damage, since I don't like the hurl animation, so I went with cross punch instead. Two aoes is better than one.

I hope not. If you want all the fun little toys, you have to make sacrifices somewhere. You shouldn't be able to just have everything. Granting more powers, or more slots for vet levels would punish players who don't exclusively focus on one character. More options are just that, more options. Vet levels are a nice little bonus for continuing to play one character. What you're suggesting would change the actual "leveling process" from 1-50 to 1-XXX, since people would almost be forced to level up to whatever arbitrary vet level stopped giving slots and powers. You already have people complaining things aren't difficult enough. And this is just asking for characters to have even MORE power, and trivialize the content even further.

So why not make a clone of it? You could have Walk, which works the way it does now, and Combat Walk which just doesn't turn off powers. Because really, it WOULD be pretty fun to just slowly walk around blasting things. Or as a mastermind, walking through a massive firefight while your minions are killing stuff.

I'm pretty sure you can get 50th level versions of the lowbie sets on pineapple. I'll have to double-check when I'm home tonight to see if the values are the same as other 50th level sets, but I'm 99% sure that I've given myself like 50th level version of sets like steadfast protection, kinetic combat, etc.

I have boxing on my SS/Will brute 4-slotted with kinetic combat for the 3.75% smash/lethal def. Generally I use it as a filler attack to pop something that's at a sliver, rather than burning a longer cooldown/animation attack on them. And it does occasionally stun minions and lt's, which is nice. I'm not sure the whole point of the "fatigued" debuff is as it doesn't really seem to do anything (if you take cross punch).

I have a SS/WP brute I'm leveling up right now that I have a projected build for at 50th, and she does extremely well in the testing I've been doing. I don't have hasten though, so that might change things around a little bit. I'm also at work so I can't post it at the moment, but generally: 44% smash/lethal defense, 40% fire/cold defense, 30-35% to most everything else 83% smash/lethal resist, 30-40% vs everything else Rage is at a 123s recharge, so it only has a 3 second downtime window, mostly due to the changes they're making on test, where stacking it is automatic crash I didn't bother taking hurl either, instead picked up the entire fighting tree to try and get the most out of cross punch, to have another aoe attack, and it works quite well. With middling fury values it's hitting for 200-230. More if I have rage popped.

I had a storyarc that I wrote back on live that focused around a villain (or small group of villains) that traveled outside of Paragon City and ended up taking over a Central American country. Smashing the military, assassinating the leaders, and installing themselves as the local powers. The goal was eventually going to be to write the followup where they had to fend off a bunch of do-gooders who tried to come in and topple their "evil regime".

Nemesis created a giant stasis field device and was going to hold the world hostage, but made a tiny miscalculation and it ended up affecting him, too. So EVERYTHING was put into stasis, until a power outage caused the machine to blink off, and let everyone out. :)

I remember back on live there was Virtueverse, which was basically "the handbook to the Virtue universe", where people could post character bios and stuff. Is there one of those around for Homecoming/Everlasting? I've been working on a big writeup for my little group of aliens called "Meet the Minar", complete with pics and stuff. I was planning on posting it here when it's done, but was wondering if there was a site like Virtueverse around too. :)

I have a beam rifle / willpower sent that I built on the test server a while back, and it's extremely durable. I was able to plow through +2/6 malta without slowing down (as long as I didn't just let the sappers keep chain-draining me), and everything else is a cakewalk. Rise to the Challenge not scaling up with enemies makes it a bit weaker against huge groups, but stronger once the group thins out. And if you're hover-blasting, it provides a lot more regen than it would if it was the melee version which requires enemies to be close to you. <edit> This is without any incarnate stuff at all, just to point out. Not even the +1 level shift from the alpha. I usually test characters without any incarnate stuff up against malta, since they're the toughest non-incarnate group out there (though vanguard might be a bit rougher, but you can't do paper missions against them). I like to see how well I can handle malta first, then add some incarnate stuff and head over to DA to try some missions on +2/8 or +4/8.

Yeah, I've been toying around with some mastermind ideas on the test server lately, to see what I can do into incarnate stuff with them. The demon/time pretty much roflstomped through a +3/6 incarnate mission, so I think with a bit of tweaking of the build (most of them are just thrown together quickly to test out ideas) I could probably comfortably do +4/8. Though to maintain a better speed I'd probably just opt for +3/6. The extra +1/2 doesn't really make much all that much of a difference in terms of rewards, but it definitely slows down progress a bit.

On my demon/time mm I've been experimenting with she's got perma-hasten and perma-chrono boost, so sitting at about 200% recharge speed, plus a bit of recharge in the pet powers from various ATO pieces. Means if I summon a pet and it dies, I can replace it very quickly if necessary. I think the tier-1 pets can be resummoned every 17s or so.

I actually made a macro for that the other day, though it's only for base teleportation. It's for my alien crew, who can use their ship to transport themselves around the city. /macro SHIP "local Ship, one to transport.$$cce 7 cclightmagic$$enterbasefrompassword <password>" Costume slot 7 is just a copy of their primary costume, so you don't actually seem to change outfits mid-teleport. I had a friend watch me use it, and unless it lags a bit during teleport, the costume change animation starts, and about midway through it the character vanishes. Just like they were being beamed up. :)

I'd be up for that. Would be nice to have a number of other options, as well. A sword and shield, maybe, to be a necromantic knight. A staff so you can wave it around and throw energy bolts like a wizard. Energy, fire, lightning, cold, or other sorts of attacks. Even if it's just cosmetic.

Yeah, I remember fighting them for the first time way back when. Back when Arachnos and Longbow were considered kind of rough to deal with at times on higher difficulties, and Malta was the "ugh, no, not a Malta mission!" group. Then you run into Vanguard, and it's like every horrible thing the other groups have rolled into one. To paraphrase Family Guy, "You think you are tough, you think all is well. But kiss my green ass, I shall see you in hell."

No, this one was doing "The Vahzilok Pollutant Plot" flashback. First mission has you go into a huge office building and try to find a ton of hostages. I'm 99% certain I searched every possible corner of the building, but it's possible the hostage was tucked into a TINY corner somewhere in an office. Hence why I'd love it if hostages actually announced their presence. Seems dumb that they stay completely silent when there are heroes running around right nearby. Or villains, if they think the villain might be better than their current predicament.