Mezmera

I feel your pain. I wasn't expecting much for doms this go since the revamp last year was a major update. Was thinking a bunch of shiny stuff for other AT's was likely. But why's it gotta be blasters...

So you're saying there's a chance.... yyeeeaahhhh.... So I assume all we have to do is play the hell out of this set and until we are heard spam: Or do they not care about doms and we are stuck in: The Dominator in me will still be asking if we can have whips involved with all the screams.

I'm not gonna get all detailed but I'd think a logical and great idea if there were to be more patron pools I'd tie them to the big bads from Praetoria. Like it could be Dominatrix (yes I like doms so thematically it fits and should be my first mention), Diabolique, Nightstar/Siege for a tech pool, Anti Matter and lastly Mother Mayhem. Or it could just be a hodgepodge of Iconic Praetorians with like 5-6 altogether ranging from good, bad and gray.

As for Endgame content to my dying day I will always be about creating more intuitive and complex content. Going Rogue absolutely pissed me off. It was promised as an expansion with new levels and tons of new content. The problem was that the new levels were going to be coming in piecemeal along with a lot of that new Endgame. Then what we got was a new tutorial zone for them to brush up their creative skills. They weren't picking up new subscribers on a dated game that was already niche and with the bulk of new stuff added it was more for people that alt a bit more than people that like to play their favorite full powered builds. Where if they'd have just made all that new stuff 35 to incarnate everyone gets to enjoy the extra stuff to do not just half the community. I voiced my discontent that it was still increasingly harder to find teams, even in the new zones, and I got a lot of "Hush up" comments, then a little while later the game was gone and a lot people got to miss out on what they were waiting for in more Endgame.

Let me preface this by saying generally I like the thought behind some things they've done while the game has been out of secret. The dom revamp was well done and well received. Having remade my main from the live days my Mind/Nrg dom does feel a tad OP whereas /Fire doms still think they are the tops. Granted there's not an outrageously overperforming secondary and you know what you're getting yourself into when you should be reading what each power set does. So catching some of the underperforming powers up to the rest felt like a great idea. So was reneging on the proposed nerf to their snipe, again I'm glad they had listened to comparing and contrasting from people asking why doms were being nerfed to be blaster-lite, is it so bad an AT has a snipe better in their kit than another when the other AT gets almost everything else better? From what I think there's works to get rid of that Energy Release mechanic for Whirling Hands and make it instantly recharge. So we are walking back something quite unique that could be better tweaked with swapping the damage percentages down a bit and then fix the bug where a lot of the time you lose the mechanic for reasons. With that I do think TW is a bit OP on a scrapper particularly /Bio but on my Brute it's meh. Then with PPM I do think there's already too many damage procs in the rare sets as it is but removing them tends to penalize most of the underperforming sets that make use of these procs to compensate. Then you'll still have blasters who aren't as reliant on these procs because they spew out fast damage with low proc rates aside from maybe the nuke. There's some reasonable arguments for proceeding with caution as what's fun for someone else gets the bat it might just be turned onto you next.

So you're suggesting as it stands now blasters have gotten their "fair" balance? And we're spending time giving them a new powerset with a pbaoe -resist debuff? Crashless nukes are outrageously OP if you're going to call into question things like TW and PPM. Then we're going to look into how power boost would affect Unleash Potential, god forbid a dominator come up with a devious plan to give them some of that survive-ability blasters just inherently get nowadays.

Yes I'm more preferential to the old Greek voting. City inhabitants were given a stone to make their mark and drop it into a vase to which votes were tallied. Funny how ancient civilizations had a better handle on how to create a system of involvement and accountability for everyone their localized politics should pertain to. Like suggest x, y, z on the table of things they were going to have a looksie into and let people with active accounts and only one vote per IP. You'd get a pretty good handle on where to point your sail I'd think.

I do find it odd how much blasters keep getting shinier and shinier. Someone on this team has a real kink for them. If you'd like to tone down the steamrolling that ensues we're going to call into question PPM but blasters have gotten the sustain ability, tons of survive-ability added to the kit in their secondaries, raised hp cap on top of their already higher base hp among other squishies and then to top it off have super duper fast recharging crashless nukes and there's no issues there? And we keep giving them new improved stuff to play with? I'm all for creating some balance but also parity is a good thing too. With certain things being tweaked here and there will there be a toning down of how good blasters have gotten on City of Damage Spam? Maybe tone down the crashless nuke a tad? I do mean an actual nerf. Not one that's a sneaky buff like what was proposed for the Snipe where the base damage was going to be raised along with a slightly longer recharge, in effect raising the proc probability as well. Yet most didn't realize this is what was happening and argued against the change and ruined it for themselves. Procs in PvP is a different story. One ice blast/hold with at least 4 procs is a bit much. Good luck normalizing anything between PvE and PvP though. Damn it's good to be a blaster! I'll just echo what some others are asking for. Before changing how +special has worked since the start of the game could we maybe get some new harder content to use it on? Like maybe an option for Incarnate difficulty added to some pre-existing Strike Forces and some new ones with fun new thought out mechanics and dynamic enemies?

Okay sorry for the radio silence on this I just wanted to give it a proper play and monitor what's all happening. I play this one so much I got a few patterns down and take some things for granted so I had to purposely do things out of the ordinary. And get a stopwatch ready. First yes it's a 15 second lockout with the icon on your status bar. If my TF hits I get locked out of being able to get it again for 15 seconds. The Energy Release mechanic seems to last for 15 seconds + the animation time of the TF. I let the Release stay built past when the icon disappears and then the mechanic goes away a few seconds after that. I had to adjust my play style a bit back because after you first experience the leakage on Energy Release you don't forget it so when I get it built I release it as soon as I see an orange ring. Hardly ever did I lose the ring jumping into a fresh fight but when I built it with TF again just after it came off of my status bar it seemed to be where it'd get lost. Early trial and error led me to know about the icon on the status bar lockout and the leakage and like I said I overcompensated by using those release powers furiously. I also have a zerging play style so I'm seeing more releases when I might not playing a different way if I paused a second after the 2nd TF icon to show up. As for the blasts building the mechanic I pulled Bolt into my chain and there's no way it built it at even close to 20% of the time. I don't know if having another alternating non-release blast would help the chances but I'm not about to respec. I also was testing it only on some gray enemies if that matters. I only like the absolute of TF and my chain is Soul Drain to TF into WH followed up with Burst and Snipe. It's been a long time since I've played a sub 25 energy dom so it was a good refresher. Power descriptions definitely could use more clarification and that leakage always needed to be fixed but there's the root cause of it.

The vast majority of people playing on Homecoming are only able to do so because factions within the old Vanguard broke apart and it was leaked that someone had their hands on the keys to the game. Whether it broke apart for reasons due to allowing more people to know about it good on them. Or if it was about design contention well lets just be glad it came to fruition.

I am calm. They can't take payment for what they are doing I know this hence why I'm insinuating my hopes are that it's likely a cost built into their donation structure. Here's a good quote for you "Look Mr. Wayne, if you don't want to tell me what you're doing, when I'm asked I won't have to lie, but don't think of me as an idiot." I never was shouting, that's you're assumption. Since old habits die hard I'm picking up on the more transparency train, game development, could care less about the actual donation allocation.

Or don't even bother with listing that, up their donation amount still, and be more transparent with what's cooking as far as what affects us all in the game. I could care less about what they list out for donations so long as they get what they need plus some for their work on the game we all care for.

Are you even comprehending what your're quoting me of? The cost of running just one shard no backups or redundancies is about $150 as illustrated on some of these other offshoots. Assuming a better host I'm giving them the benefit of $250 a shard. So backups and redundancies total out to be triple the cost of what it would take to run the whole thing? Mkay. You're telling me car repair services don't include the cost of labor in their repairs? They can list their expenses with certain costs maybe built in and I'm hoping they get some of the money for doing this and want them to add cost of labor to their donation tabulation and up the donation amount. Or don't even bother with listing that, up their donation amount still, and be more transparent with what's cooking as far as what affects us all in the game. I could care less about what they list out for donations so long as they get what they need plus some for their work on the game we all care for. Don't be naive.

I'm pretty familiar with that power. I'm not sure how confused I am yet, I may need another application before I notice the effect. Hopefully valid critiques aren't being brushed aside as "confusion", typically confusion is born out of secrecy. If these other servers had 5 shards and a test server it'd amount to lets say $1500. You're telling me redundancies and other QoL features would rack up to be 3-4x the cost of running the thing? Look I think you all deserve to get monies for your work, or at least a ham sandwich. I'd actually advocate for bumping up the donation amount and officially classify Stars and a few other hard workers on this thing as an actual dev team. I get there's responsibility that would come with that acknowledgement but so be it there's already some more expectation on this project than the others. As an outsider learning about what had went on prior to HC it's pretty upsetting but honestly it's water under the bridge. Going forward is where I'm more apt to hold for more accountability. Hence why I don't like the idea of secret servers where I hear already top tier Fire powers are getting buffs and no one but the old guard has a say. I'm hoping the new blood can get mixed in a bit with the old gatekeepers to get more creative discussions. Again:

Well. There's other servers that have already many more powersets and fresh new toys to play with. What seems like a lot more innovation. I can only surmise this was already implemented when everybody in the Sekrit broke off. Take for instance the Origin pools. All of them are already coded and working on all the other offshoot servers, why then is it taking years for them to be implemented here? Seems like a carrot on a stick to me. Some of those servers seem to make the player so OP it's not even fun and then some seem very grindy. This one seems to have a decent balance and quite the large player base, albeit dwindling. I prefer some of the things they do on this server namely the dom revamp that's new all around. These other servers run their donations for a few hundred bucks which is the cost of hosting the servers and that is it. They have quite a bit more stuff implemented although they have their problems which'd easily be ironed out with dropping a few OP improvements that were added. So you're telling me 5k+ for less stuff implemented in the game is better than the cost of a few hundred bucks and if they had 5 running servers it'd still be way cheaper. So that leaves one to ask where's the beef? Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with the intention of the donation model and capping it to their needs but when comparing apples to apples you gotta ask how come one has way more stuff at far lower the maintenance fees. I'm also okay with that donation amount going to actually clarifying that they have people designated as developers to push the game forward. Like I said this is my favorite iteration and want to see it succeed, what I don't want to see is more of what took place for those secretive 7 years.

The old Energy Transfer was fantabulous although I will concede that the old 1 second animation didn't feel as intimidating as the damage that followed it. To pick up on Zork's suggestion, If there'd be a way to configure a new epic animation that strikes fear in the hearts of heroes that may be slower than what it was originally but sped up from what it is now that'd be one nice step forward. The damage feels ho-hum for the animation time wasted on what's supposed to be the most fearsome ST attack in the game. I'd say a good approach would be to pick up on what happened with the Dom's Energy Assault but fine tune the mechanic to give an absurdly good ST attack. Default I'd speed up TF to the dom speed then an Energy Release mechanic would be cool but instead of the big boon for doms it being Whirling Hands I'd make it so that Energy Transfer benefits the greatest from the mechanic. Let Energy Melee claim king of ST that it was.

I'm pretty much on board with what's being said here. I do get that it's a volunteer project but they do rake in quite the donation amount compared to the other servers that are just up and running with no real develop team supposedly in place to be adding on to this game. There's obviously an appetite for the game to be back in an official capacity based on how fast and furious the donations come in. In summation I think there's either comparatively a mismanagement in the funds from donations or there's a lack of foresight that people might actually want new stuff to be added on to with such a large pool of resources donated every month and to have info updated to them other than telling them the specs of their server costs and miscellaneous expenses. For the first few months if you need to keep things close to the vest fine but somewhere in the next 3-6 months you should enlighten and trust your player base. It's a very off putting feeling seeing how there is testing and it's been going on for months on a secret "Elite" server with the same shades of how this game stayed so secret for 7 years. I think I've spent more time on the forums than I have actually in game for the past month so I stand with Mr. Toast.

Like I said I'm watching my status bar like a hawk for that icon to go away so that I can build the mechanic again. I'd notice something was amiss specifically with losing the mechanic from building it with TF again just after the one prior disappeared from my status bar. It doesn't happen to me even 10% of the time playing this way or I'd have noticed it was this specific.

There's a misunderstanding here. It happens at times when I've just started fighting on a new mission. Sometimes it happens this way as well but it hardly does this when that icon goes away, I'm watching that status like a hawk so I can get another juicy Whirling Hands out there. All in all it's still a rare occurrence however it happens to get in a tizzy about.

Yes I take Weaken Resolve and slot just the Achilles -res proc in it since that'll fire theoretically 90% of the time so you're getting -27% resist on target. Then I take Mighty Leap for my travel and then the very nice defense boost in Unleash Potential. You'll have a nice debuff useful for AV fights, a travel and a great defense power.

I'm saying that I load up a TF to get my Energy Release activated. Then the very next thing I go to do is to position myself better for the Whirling Hands by moving ever so slightly. Before I have the chance to do anything other than take a few steps and before TF has even begun to recharge I will lose the orange rings. It's a bug that does happen ever so often.

Powerboost does increase the potency of anything that provides defense. So yes it does increase CJ and Hover. Keep in mind though is that the boost only stays active on toggle defenses while Powerboost is active. But something like Unleash Potential where you can increase it's defense through Powerboost the boost to the defense stays active for the whole minute that Unleash is active just so long as you used Powerboost first and in conjunction with Unleash Potential.

I'm saying there's no rhyme or reason why all of a sudden you might lose that Energy Mechanic. I've loaded up an Energy Release by using a TF and watching my tray with the powers and their orange rings I'll move slightly and for no reason at all those rings disappear. I haven't fired any of the release powers nor has anything else had the chance to even recharge yet because I've only used TF (which hadn't recharged again) and lose it almost instantly after building it that way. There seems to be some leakage in the Energy Release mechanic. The mechanic when it does last it lasts past the time that those icons disappear from your status bar. I know this because I'm chasing to use the mode some times and keep track that I can build another with a TF right after releasing the one I've currently built.