Adeon Hawkwood

Ok, I apparently completely misunderstood how mez protection works. Thanks for the clarification.

So is that NC Soft's new business model?

*shrug* I was going by the wiki which says 3. I don't play controllers so my knowledge of boss mez protection is pretty much that it's greater than 2. Time to get Surveillance out and do some in game checking I guess .

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Confus....2C_Protection

Ok, pedantic discussion of an expression first . We do have all the bases covered. Here's a nice definition of the origin of the expression:
The current selection of ATs does cover all of the bases, we have melee fighters, we have ranged fighters, we have controllers, we have (de)buffers and we have summoners. These are the primary roles in a combat game and any new AT would fill some combination of these.

To expand the expression, we have all of our bases covered, we just don't have all of the outfielders .

Obviously there are more combinations that can be made with the original powersets (you could probably even make a new Assault/Manipulation style set which combines aspects from two other sets). The question is do they provide a useful expansion to the range of play styles without rendering existing ATs obsolete?

Also regarding your suggestion on new types of pets. There is no reason those couldn't be done as new MM sets. The devs give the sets the same progression because they want to not because they have to (although balance wise it is probably useful).

EDIT: Ok it occurs to me I should add an example. You mention a Pet/Blast AT. Masterminds currently have an absolutely awful ranged damage modifier (they do about half Blaster damage). The problem is that if you make it with the current damage modifier it's pretty much useless compared to a regular Mastermind since the extra damage from the blast set would be useless when compared to the extra damage and mitigation of a buff set. Conversely if you upped the damage modifier then you run the risk of creating a class which has more damage than a blaster (mastermind + pets) and better survivability (bodyguard mode). You could nerf the pet's damage and increase the damage modifier but I can't really see that working out to well. A large part of being a mastermind is controlling the pets for maximum damage, if they don't do much damage why bother having them?

I know that, it doesn't mean that I agree with them. I selected 500 for my example since that brings the current Apocalypse Inf prices into approximate alignment with LotG 7.5% which to me serve as a decent bench mark for a direct merit to inf conversion rate. Now obviously allowing Purples to be purchased with merits would change the relative pricing so if I was adding them I'd say to stick them in the 600-700 range, maybe 1000 max. Of course as I stated, I think adding purples to merits would do bad things to the supplies of pool C/D recipes so I'm against it anyway.

The entire universe will be destroyed. And as an environmentalist, I'm against that.

I don't think that it's so much they don't want them as they don' NEED them (although there are plenty of players who don't play their level 50s enough to really want purples). Unlike other MMOs there is no content that is inaccessible to a team equipped solely with SOs so the only purpose of purples (and indeed IOs in general) is character progression for the sake of character progression (and a few extreme personal challenges such as AV soloing). Given that I think purples should take time and commitment to get since otherwise there is no real sense of progression just a sudden leap in power.

I tend to agree that it would be nice to have some team based methods for getting purples but I don't see a good option without greatly decreasing their rarity other than allowing them to be bought with merits (which isn't a great idea). Anything that is based on random drops will always favor farming and farming will always favor being done with the fewest people possible.

Purples could be added as direct buys with merits but overall I think this would be a bad thing. They'd realistically need to be at least 500 merits a recipe and that means people would start hoarding merits to buy purples rather than directly buying valuable recipes or better yet taking random rolls and injecting those recipes into the economy. The introduction of merits caused a huge decrease in the supply of Pool C/D (although subsequent changes have helped somewhat with that) and I think adding purples to merits would make that worse.

What I would quite like to see is a re-balancing of the purple drop rates in order to try and even out the prices somewhat. The market is pretty oversupplied with the purple mez sets (particularly confuse and sleep) and undersupplied with the damage sets (particularly Apocalypse). it would be nice if the devs did the same thing they did with the random recipe rolls and rebalanced purple drops so a higher percentage of them were the more popular damage sets.

Actually what really bugs me about the second comic is that it says they aren't killing them, but they are apparently firing lots of arrows at them.

We had him go invincible again during the middle of the fight. I'm not talking about Unstoppable, he went back to the phased state where attacks don't work (and regained about 30% of his health during it). I assumed at the time that we hadn't hit him with the grounding ray enough but apparently it was a weird bug.

Well according to Red Tomax the Damage Resistance portion of PFF is tagged to ignore enhancements so the answer is no. (Ribosome Exposures do increase Endurance and Damage Resistance though if you've got a hundred million or so spare and want to test this).

I think that you could take just about any powerset and find some version of the vampire mythos somewhere that would justify it. For the traditional Dracula style vampire a Mind Control/Storm Summoning Controller would seem the most fitting.

There are plenty of other powersets that easily fit the vampire image.

A Dark/Dark Defender or Corrupter would represent the more magically inclined servant of darkness. Similarly a Necromancer/Dark Mastermind would take this to the furthest extreme.

For melee toons you've got a few options. Again Dark/Dark would be a magically inclined vampire with a fondness for melee. A sword based set (Broadsword, Dual Blades, or Katana) gives you a fallen knight style vampire similar to the Blood Dragons from Warhammer. Martial Arts might be used to represent a more modern urbane version of the fallen knight vampire, he relies on his native strength and extreme skills to best his opponents in hand to hand but avoids carrying an obvious weapon to avoid suspicion. For a more feral, bestial vampire you could use either Super Strength or Claws depending on what sort of appearance you're going for. For defense sets Dark, Inv, SR and Regen would all fit depending on exactly what style you want to go for.

For Blasters you could go Psychic/Mental. It's a bit of a stretch since while most vampire mythos does give them psychic powers they tend to be more along the lines of influencing and controlling others rather than scrambling their brains. A Mind Control/Psychic Assault Dominator suffers from the same thematic issues.

A Warshade can also make a decent vampire thematically since their powers are already dark and revolve around drawing strength from their enemies.

Thanks, I thought it had that stuff somewhere but I've never been able to find it.

You are correct. My point was that I'm not sure why you're tying the IO level you slot to the power availability level. If I slot say level 31 IOs in a power then I will get the Set Bonuses at level 28 regardless of whether I took the power at level 1 or level 49. Your maximum statement implies that you slot IOs so that you get the Set Bonuses at any exemplaring level where the power that they are slotted in is available. The point I wanted to make is that you don't need to be able to use the power to get the benefit of it's Set Bonuses.

From what I can tell hitting him with the grounding ray does not stop him going Unstoppable. I did once see him go invulnerable again during the middle of the fight and I would assume it's because we didn't hit him with ray frequently enough.