Zamuel

Originally Posted by SwellGuy

It seems to me most players have not learned to use inspirations to overcome their character's issues.

It is far rarer to be able to dump an inspiration on a team mate than to get the message their inventory is full and they don't have room for it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Theoretically, you could hit them with a power that reduced the magnitude of the phased effect. When someone is held, they are hit with a power that increases the magnitude of their "Held" attribute. If that value increases above 0, they are basically held. Normally, its base value is -1. Hold protection values "buff" that number to be even lower. So when you have Practiced Brawler running, it might be something like -10. You'd then need to be hit by at least 10.0001 magnitude hold to be held. That's how mez effects work.

Being phased is basically being hit with a hold, only its your phased state that goes up not your hold state. Hitting someone with a power that reduced your phase state would snap you out of being phased, just like hitting someone with clear mind can snap them out of being held. Of course, how you're going to do that when they are phased is tricky: you would have to phase yourself, hit them with the "unphase" and then unphase yourself. Or have a power capable of affecting phased things specifically.


Not much. Its like holding something that is held. The get locked into a higher magnitude hold, but there's only two real states: Held and Not Held. You can't really be "More Held" although being hit with stacked holds can make it harder to get out of the hold with things like break frees.


Honestly, not much, at least as far as slotting goes. Intangibility enhancements only affect the intangibility part of the powers, not the "phased" parts or the "only affects self" parts (I believe).


For a single power, its not true and is never true. All powers have one or more effects. These effects are things like damage, tohit debuff, heal, sleep, etc. Each effect is separate. For each effect, the effect has something called a Scale Value. Its the "size" of the effect. There's also a flag that says whether the Scale Value is the effect's Magnitude or Duration. So typically, damage effects are tagged "magnitude" because the scale value is the magnitude of the damage (not the duration of the damage, which would be nonsensical). On the other hand, mez effects are typically tagged as "duration" effects, which means the scale value represents how long the effect lasts. When an effect is tagged "magnitude" there is a separate field that says what its duration is, and conversely when an effect is tagged "duration" there is a separate field that says what its magnitude is.

Important: when you enhance a power, and boost effects in that power, the *only* thing you can change is its Scale Value. You can't boost anything else, period. So if the effect is tagged "magnitude" then slotting (and buffs and debuffs and all other effects - even the purple patch) affect the effect's magnitude. Damage effects are like that. If the effect is tagged "duration" then the only thing you can affect is the duration of the power. A single power can have different effects tagged differently. An attack that does damage and holds (say, Blind) will have the damage effect tagged magnitude and the mez effect tagged duration. Damage enhancements will boost the magnitude of the damage, and Hold enhancements will boost the duration of the hold, in the same power.

Its *impossible* for a power to have an effect in which enhancements increase both the magnitude and the duration of that one specific effect, because there's no way to do that. *Different* effects can be individually affected in different ways, like the Blind example above. But note that its not the *enhancement* that determines what happens, but actually the *power*. The enhancement just says "boost Hold." The power says "when you boost my hold, increase its duration please."

Unless the devs did something very special to intangible powers when I wasn't looking, this general principle applies to all powers and all effects. All enhancements have the ability to increase duration or magnitude, but no power can have an effect that has both an enhanceable magnitude and an enhanceable duration. Remember: its really just one number - Scale Value - and a flag which says which one the scale value is. Clearly, you can only boost one or the other for a given effect in a given power.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Powers can be specifically flagged to shoot through untouchable flags - basically a power can be specially tagged to ignore phase shifting and hit you no matter what. I believe Police drone attacks are similarly tagged.