Wintry

This calls for...

Interfaces don't apply any debuffs.
Verified for Diamagnetic and Reactive, assumed the same for Gravimetric and Paralytic.
Reactive DoT component still works, but then again that works entirely differently.
This conclusion is based on testing with Power Analyzer Mk III.

Boosters do not work on procs etc.
What they do is add to enhancement of attributes on a power. If an IO boosts damage of the power, the percentage of damage boost that IO delivers is upped. The reason it doesn't work with procs is extremely simple: the procs don't enhance any of the power's attributes.
You can't accidentally waste boosters on procs because the system will not allow you to slot them.

The boost is substantial and can be worth it depending on the type of player you are. A min/max player will generally get more out of it than a casual player who couldn't care less for that bit extra.

The effectiveness of enhancement boosters is subject to ED since the boosts are applied prior to the final percentages of attribute enhancement being subjected to diminishing returns.

To give you an indication, for schedule A attributes, the boost is slightly over a percent per booster.

As long as you don't push the ED cap you will get a decent benefit out of them - whether you find it worth it will vary from player to player.

An example for illustration sake of a particularly useful thing to do with them:
Hasten two slotted with 2 L50 recharge IOs (without Spiritual alpha or whatever) has a recharge enhancement value of 83.3%.
Add 10 boosters and it gets to 95.9% which in most cases doesn't make it worth it to spend a 3rd slot there and push the attribute way into the ED cap for a 99% enhancement value.

I don't even mind the maintenance/hotfix, but it's just plain annoying we have to wait for a scheduled maintenance with a server already broken to the point you can't get in at all.
If that doesn't get fixed before this maintenance it'll effectively turn into at least (not going back further than I first tried 'cause I don't know how long it wasn't working already, and assuming the maintenance doesn't get extended) an 11 hour downtime for that server.
After downtimes of various length on tuesday, wednesday and thursday already that starts to get just a little bit annoying.

Same, we're just gonna be sitting in the queue until maintenance hits in 7 hours...

Edit: filed petition to ensure awareness.

They may as well take it down now...
As it stands it looks like I'm gonna have:
NOW - 1800 CEST Retrieving character list from Defiant
1800 CEST - 2200 CEST Maintenance
(2200 CEST - 0300 CEST Extended maintenance, unconfirmed...)

That's said theory and although shiny numbers are good to start with and it's how I first go about making decisions as well at the end of the day it's still a world apart from the effective damage output in practice.
It doesn't reflect how one power that scatters mobs affects subsequent uses of a cone or AoE in terms of mobs hit by it to the respective power's target cap ratio.
It doesn't reflect the effect of the fact pets never take the lead on their own initiative unless they aggro to something, etc..., etc...

I've been over the theories as well - I'm just looking for some numbers to put that in the right perspective now.
Unfortunately I don't have the crab myself.
Hence the question.

People tell me an AoE crab is more efficient in terms of effective cumulative damage output than an AoE Fort.
I doubt this.

Now I've heard all the theoretic reasoning, but I was wondering if anyone had any solid numbers on the Crab side of things.
Has anyone ever collected any stats (e.g. HeroStats stats) on the effective DPS of an AoE crab over the course of various regular missions?

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=213578

Not much has happened around this for quite some time. Partly because there was little reason to walk down this path any further as it seemed after a brief peak in which a good number of people made use of the Teamspeak server it quickly fell quiet.
The lesson learned for me is it needs to be easier. I've noticed there was plenty interest, but too much hassle made folks not bother after a little while.

So, time for change.

Today I took the Teamspeak server down and replaced it with Murmur - the server software used in conjunction with the Mumble client.
Programmatic verification of being an active player of this game is off the table. The new server doesn't require access tokens or anything of similar nature to connect to.

To ensure it doesn't become a mess, we'll simply need more admins around to keep everything in check. This is of no concern for the moment yet though. If activity grows I'll look into candidates for this task as the amount of people using Mumble increases.

Getting started is easy now.

All I hope is you can start this one with less than 187 players...

I'm quite happy with how it turned out as well.
Activity has gone up which is always a good thing. Allows us to get more teams to play different kinds of content more easily.

As for that fear the EU servers would just somehow magically run empty, I've been saying this all along from way ahead of the merge:
Some people will want to try the other servers for any of a number of reasons.
For instance, you're on EU and have friends on the US side or vice versa, you're just curious about how they play on the other side of the ocean or for years you've already missed most of the action because you have a job with shifts that forces you to sleep through your own primetime or whatever.
Fact of the matter is these reasons apply fairly equally to the entire playerbase, both on EU and US side.
On average it will apply to about the same share of players on both sides.

Now, don't argue the number 'cause I'm just gonna make up a completely random number for illustration sake: let's say this applies to 5% of the playerbase - 5% of the US want to check out EU for whatever reason and vice versa...
There are exceptions, but for most US/NA players german and french speaking servers aren't a hugely viable option, which leaves them with Defiant and Union to pick from.

The result: 5% of the combined playerbases of 11 servers check out any one or both of 2 servers and 5% of the combined playerbases of 2 servers check out any one or multiple of 11 servers.
Granted, once you figure out you like US servers you may roll on several and a US player is done with visiting 2 which may further affect actual playtime per server etc, but roughly at the basis it works like this.

And we're seeing the result of that. I imagine on US servers the difference in activity isn't going to be hugely impressive (as a small share of less servers coming to visit makes less of an impact on their higher absolute numbers) and it may only be really substantially noticable outside of the US primetime, but on the EU side (Defiant in my case) I see a clear overall activity increase throughout nearly the entire day except the really early US morning. When even west coast passes the 4 am or so the difference with before gets negligible for some hours, but other than I see an overall activity increase.

It never was rocket science.