Samuel_Tow

Ah, now I see the problem. DPA, or Damage Per Activation, is a metric of damage per second of attack cycle, not just per second of animation time. An attack cycle is the time the attack takes to animate plus the time it takes to recharge, and you may or may not take Arcanatime into account depending on how precise you want your calculations to be. That explains the huge numbers I was seeing, as you're counting just animation time. Since VERY few powers actually have an animation time balanced with just about anything, that kind of metric just isn't meaningful.

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Yeah, I see your points. But things are going to change soon, and I'm afraid people are not going to like the results, of how it is fixed. The way we are leveling up characters so fast is ridiculous.

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Can you maybe cite a source for this prediction and explain how the changes you know are coming are worse than castrating the entire Architect system such that only farmers will ever get to use it?

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And yes, I don't mind the elite or people who have been here a long time having an advantage.

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Unfortunately, I do have a problem with it. Veterans already have enough of an advantage.

I'd actually like to see per-costume-item translucency of some sort allowed at costume creation. This could let us make, say, an invisible head, invisible arms, invisible legs and so forth, as well as let us have a wholly-translucent body.

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it seems only the cartel a bunch of self-elitists who think they are so much better than the rest are the ones on the grief route. get a grip cause im looking forward to your confrontation. i am in no way scared of an internet bully. you dont like it fine but i cant see any fault in the theory.it probably rings to close to home. you doing something illegal that you dont want out?

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You're the only bully here, because you're trying to sell malicious arguments as absolute truth and take pot shots at anyone who disagrees with you, manufacturing hidden agendas and sending out pointless taunts. If you have a point that can stand on its own merits, you wouldn't have to browbeat people who disagree with you. The fact of the matter is you have neither a point nor an argument, just a conspiracy theory you claim "rings close to home" because people deny it. That's pretty close to the Galileo fallacy - just because someone denies an argument, this doesn't make it proof that the argument is true. It's equally possible that a person will deny an argument out of guilt as it is possible a person will deny an argument because the argument is plain not true.

Don't be a chicken little. Don't try to bully people into agreeing with your agenda. Convince them. Don't expect them to either get with the programme or keep their mouths shut. You're on a public forum, and treating people rudely and aggressively does not make your point any more true, it just makes more and more people simply not listen to you. Take my word for it - posing like a tough guy doesn't make you seem any tougher. It just makes you seem silly. Your arguments don't become any more true the more times you repeat them and the more disagreements you handwave away. They become more true if you become more convincing, which you have not done.

As for your actual problem, it's exceedingly minor. It takes several months for my characters to amass around 50-100 spam e-mails, and it takes anywhere from as many to twice as many seconds to report them all and clear my e-mail box for the next few months. That's three or four minutes once every couple of months, and only on characters I haven't played in a while. The ones I'm actually playing don't get more than one a week, and that one is easy enough to report.

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Keystrokes are generally queued. As the main application thread handles events, it grabs the next keystroke out of the event queue and handles it. Once it's handled, it is supposed to be removed from the queue. This is supposed to happen in first-in, first-out order so keystrokes appear on the screen in the right order.
It sounds like that's not happening: keystrokes remain in the queue, and that's why they suddenly appear in the password field, or the chat window, or they get selected first when you tap an attack key during combat. If you're in combat, and the next available keystroke in the queue, for instance, is a W instead of a 1, you'll move forward one tiny step instead of firing off the power in the first slot of tray 1.
Granted, this is all wild theory and speculation. I haven't seen the code. But based on how event-driven software works (and almost all software today is event-driven), it sounds like a pretty stable idea. It certainly seems to fit the symptoms, especially given that I've encountered the problems with text appearing in the password field, and powers not firing off in the middle of combat sans lag.
Fascinating.

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That's something like what I figured, myself. I've never seen buttons stop working, myself (packet loss and connection ping can just cause powers to de-queue themselves or not register, but that doesn't count), but from the looks of things, it appears that they're being saved in ANOTHER buffer separate from the one they're read out of to execute commands, which is then dumped on the chat line ala /beginchat. The game already has the functionality to enter text into the chat line as you activate it.

Now, the big thing here is that the symbols dumped into the chat line are buttons that already WORKED. If I buy something for 250 000 inf and hit enter, chances are my chat will have 250000 dumped in the front. I already typed that into Wentworth's, so it obviously worked, but it got remembered somewhere and entered into a text field a second time. To my eyes, there's some kind of secondary keyboard buffer that handles keypresses separately from the text field they are entered into or the function they activate, and for some reason it's either not getting flushed or the chat line is reading from it when it shouldn't be.

Of course, that's all just baseless theory, but it's interesting nonetheless

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There are some photos here.
http://www.wwe.com/superstars/raw/ha.../newrawphotos/
None of them are of the pic Torak used for his avatar, but that's most definately the guy in question.

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I'm afraid I have to disagree. I remember his avatar quite vividly, and I cannot say that this guy is the one in Torak's avatar at all. He has the beard, yes, though not really the hair, however his face is completely different from what I remember. I could be wrong, of course, but I'm more sure about this than I am when I state things as facts most of the time.

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I miss MZZ_Torak too. And yeah, that's not him. Just outta curiosity I googled and found him on Steam.

This is him.

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Cool! This is indeed Torak, in his later Avatar. Thanks for the find!

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Also, one thing that I find helps with some doms - don't play on difficulty 2 or 4; instead, play on difficulty 1, 3, or 5. Making the mobs go up one level is actually less annoying than adding more of them, at least for mostly single-target sets. Since you're in the 20s and can slot SOs, you should have the accuracy to play on level 3, which should probably be a lot easier than level 2.

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The thing with difficulty 3 is that it sends my accuracy in the tank. Yes, with SOs I can slot for it, but it would require me to multi-slot accuracy, and I just don't have the slots for that. I never have. If I had my way, I'd never fight anything above even con, in fact I suppose I could get back down to Villainous, but... Well, having my bosses scaled down isn't very exciting. And besides, all my other characters, even my crappiest Blasters, manage to hold out well on Tenacious/Malicious. If my Dominator can't, that would make him a second-rate character that I can't really condone. Hopefully more reliable AoE control will help keep me where I am.

I'm slightly worried about status effects, though. I'm back to the dark days of Blasters where if I got held, it was all done for. Now Blasters can shoot even when held, killing what's holding them, but for a Dominator, that isn't an option. About the only thing I can do to avoid that is pop Domination, but... What if that's not recharged or built up? Or what if it has decayed? Or what if holding enemies are present in every spawn, such as they Yellow Ink Men? This has me worried.

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Fortunately or unfortunately, you picked Gravity Control, which doesn't get its best Soft Control option (Wormhole) until level 26.

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I seem to have this kind of luck when branching out into a new AT. When I first played a Blaster, I picked up AR/Dev, which I consider to be the WORST combination for a Blaster after having played around with them. Unfortunately, that was also my first Blaster to 50, was made prior to the Smoke Grenade fix and before the Defiance changes, so I got to enjoy every miserable moment of every problem Blasters ever had. Yuck! When I first played Brutes, my original pick was Stone/Stone, which while very good, is also VERY endurance-heavy, something which plagued me ALL The way up to 50, as that was my first 50 villain ever. When I picked Masterminds, my first serious character was a Mercs/Traps Mastermind, and at the time Mercs damage was... Not very good, let's put it like that. And while Traps is a cool set, a lot of its powers are slow and cumbersome to use, just like Devices, which slowed him down even further. He was 44 last I saw him, and I got to enjoy all of his shortcomings, though being a Mastermind, that wasn't nearly as evident. And now I picked Gravity Control for my first Dominator, a set I have since seen pretty much nothing but criticism for. Oh, well. I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Singularity does look very promising, but... Well, one thing I've never so much as considered accepting is the notion that a character is horribly terrible now, but will be OH SO GOOD in just 30 levels. And in the meantime? It's a long trudge of suck. I just don't roll that way, which is why I never touched Controllers and Dominators before. I don't enjoy taking bloody ages to kill stuff, even if that changes later. So far, I'm still not at the "total suck" mark, and things do look to be improving, somewhat. I'm still worried for the future, though. I'll see how much Wormhole helps, but I'm not sure I'll be able to hold out until Singularity.

Hmm... This isn't an aspect ratio problem, or at least isn't JUST an aspect ratio problem. Even the incorrect ratio would still fit into the screen, it would just be stretched or squashed. Are you using a resolution different to what you have on your desktop? Perhaps your picture in that resolution is just not set up well.

If you're on a laptop, I'm afraid I don't know where the controls for that are, but there should be a way to order your LCD to automatically detect picture position and dimensions and make it fit the viewable area of the screen. I'm not sure where those controls would be, though, and you'll probably have to go through some kind of laptop functional key combination that's probably unique to your manufacturer.

Beyond that, I'm stumped and you'll need someone with a bigger brain than mine

There was an old bug that did that - it wouldn't remember newer keybinds properly and would lose them when you zone and your keybinds are loaded from the server or some such. Last I heard about it was years ago, and I don't remember a solution to it. Sorry that I don't have any way to help you, but hopefully someone who's tackled this before will have more information for you.

I've had this happen at least three times, and all three times it was a fan warping off-centre of its shaft. Twice it was the fan on my chipset, in fact. Not the big one glued to the CPU, but a smaller one off to the side, about as big as a wrist watch. I'm not really sure what it's for and if all motherboards have it, but that seems to fail more than anything else. Beyond that, I've had the fan on my video card do that once. The thing is, the fan will keep turning, but it will make a horrible sound when it does so, and tapping it DOES fix the problem. From what I've been told, the evidence that this is happening is if the fan is turning more slowly and with less force.

The only thing you can really do in this situation is open up your case when it's buzzing, stick your head in there and try to listen for the source of the sound. You should be able to pick up if not the exact source, then at least the general part of the case it's coming from, which should narrow your search area. If it's a buzzing sound, though, I'd say that's a fan.

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If you aren't tied to specific concept or are willing to try a different character you might want to give mind/energy a try.

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I'm afraid I am pretty much tied to this concept at the moment. It just fits the character very well and I like the general idea. Plus, I'm really not prepared to invest all the time to get another Dominator to 20 if I don't have at least SOME assurance it will turn out OK. I'll stick with this one for a while yet and hope for light at the end of the tunnel. But I'm having unpleasant flashbacks to Blasters pre Defiance changes, and how much I felt like a wimp who runs away screaming like a little girl at the sight of a boss or more than three minions. Blasters still have that going against them to some extent, but between some degree of control and HUGE damage with access to really strong buffs, it sort of makes up for it. I've yet to see what Dominators have that balances against their apparently even worse survivability.

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First of all, are you talking about before or after the Domination change? Because I can take out one foe right off the bat with a Sniper attack. A Hold will take out another. I can usually concentrate enough fire on another that by the time he gets into melee, getting into Blapper range with me is instantly fatal. That's three right there. What spawn sizes are you taking on? Do you have your Difficulty set to 4?

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After the changes. I wouldn't have even looked at Dominators before. "Support" ATs that may or may not become good at level 32 don't do it for me, but I've found the changes to "unlock" the AT for me. And I wouldn't hedge my bets on Snipes. My biggest problems are specific lieutenant pairs, and those aren't easily one-shotted with a snipe. Though that's actually not a bad idea. Soon as I get mine, I'll likely be opening with it. There doesn't seem to be much else that's as good for a first attack in an Assault set.

Also, I have my difficulty set to Level 2.

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No, you don't stand around, that's fatal. You shouldn't need an AoE hold to take on a spawn, though. In fact, opening with an AoE is the surest way to get killed. If you are soloing and can't make do with single target holds, there's something way wrong.

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I didn't mean stand around in combat More stand around and wait for them to recharge before I open, which I've done a few times. I can't say that my experience opening with Power Boost + Gravity Distortion Field have been bad. Most of the time I can whittle down enough enemies by the time they wake up that Gravity Distortion and Death can take care of the rest easily. There's just this pesky recharge to deal with...

If my inability to survive on just a single-target hold means something is wrong, I am more than open to suggestions as to how to fix it. Being faced with five minions all firing at range, though, there doesn't seem to be much a single-target hold can do to save me. Such situations (which didn't end in my defeat) are resolved through either killing two or three and holding the rest or Dimension-Shifting them all so I can rest in the middle of them. Either works, but isn't reliable or indeed very productive.

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I'll also disagree that Blasters have as much control. My Blaster has Tesla Cage. Gravity Distortion is a 18 second hold cast every 8 seconds. Tesla Cage is an 8 second hold cast every 10 seconds. Sure, you could perma-stun a foe with /Energy but 1) you have to be in melee 2) you have to keep attacking to keep up the stun and 3) not all Blasters are /Energy.

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Blaster SETS don't (typically, there are exceptions) but Blasters as a finished product often have multiple control effects. Dominators simply don't have access to these in their entire AT. Their Secondaries and Epics simply don't offer more control. That would be kind of like offering more melee attacks in Scrapper Epics. So Dominators end up with a single-target hold, a single-target stun and a bunch of AoE effects. Which is good for AoE control, but not as good for single-target control. I WILL grant you that their single-target control powers are easily evidently superior, which is how things SHOULD be. I was just expecting a bigger difference than I'm seeing.

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If you can't hold a foe and deal with the rest of them within 18 seconds, well, I don't know that more hit points would do more than just delay the inevitable.

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Interestingly, that's rarely the problem so much as the 10 seconds it takes for my hold to recharge and affect a second target. And no, sometimes I can't handle everyone in 18 seconds. Sometimes I can go down from a full-spawn salvo in a couple of seconds flat. The Lost Anathema, for instance, take me down to 1/3 health in just two ranged attacks, and I CANNOT stop them from firing them because they're resistant to holds and show up in every spawn. Council soldiers play firing squad on me, and unless I can AoE-hold them, I have to take their fire. More hit points would give me more time to reduce the enemy numbers or take out dangerous enemies, after which point the fight becomes easy.

Interestingly, most of my Blasters can clear a spawn in around 4 seconds, but that's besides the point Comparing to a Blaster, though, I can afford to stand and fight a LOT more on a Blaster than I can on a Dominator. I was hoping I wouldn't HAVE to stand and fight as much, but with AoE controls on long timers and single-target controls coming short against 5-man spawns, that isn't always the case, and I don't have the patience to teleport-pull out of every spawn, even if it didn't cause full spawn aggro as often as it does.

I'm not saying the AT is broken, but rather that I'm probably missing something obvious.

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I do agree with the dilemma about whether to slot Control powers for control or damage, and if you want to specialize with control in the Primary, and damage in the Secondary, that's fine too. But you have exactly the same dilemma when slotting Blaster Secondaries, the immobilize or stun has to be slotted for either damage or control, and usually you would choose the damage first. (Or I would...)

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Not quite the same, as Blasters are quite obviously designed for damage, so slotting things for damage is more or less working as intended. I more or less have my answer on that one, though - given that both powers I can slot for damage or status effect do barely as much as my weakest, fastest-recharging attack, I'll put off slotting them for damage until later to never, depending on what slots permit. I suspect that, even in the best case scenario, I won't slot them for damage by much anyway.

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Well, from what I understand, Wormhole is not the greatest of AoE control powers. There are other sets that perform much better. That's Gravity, there are other sets that perform much better. You hear a lot of that. On the other hand, Wormhole being effectively an AoE Teleport Foe has a utility which goes beyond it's Control capability. That's not going to show up in the numbers, though, the DPS or the "survivability time" or whatever the heck metric you're using to compare A to B.

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I'd be interested to hear what large-scale enemy teleportation can be good for. Again, never having played Gravity Control, I just don't know, and I was never able to glean any useful on the subject from the few flamewars I read. I have use for single-target enemy teleportation to sucker-pull on occasion, but that doesn't seem to be an effective tactic for group-teleporting enemies around. Without substantial AoEs, I don't believe I have much use in herding, either, though I suppose teleporting and immobilizing a spawn can let me hide around a corner and pick them off a few at a time while avoiding enemy fire. Never was a fan of terrain-dependent powers, though, as terrain is too unreliable in itself.

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The thing is, as I said, I feel the AoE holds are not really meant to be up all the time. That was the behavior of control sets long ago, before ED. Controllers got a serious nerf to control, gaining Containment and its damage in exchange for their AoEs. Blasters ended up getting nerfed, too, losing some duration from their controls so they would stay "weaker" than Controller counterparts.

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Yeah, I remember the outcry when the control changes happened And I actually agree with them... To some extent. Locking down everything all the time is useful, but not very interesting to actually do spawn after spawn after spawn. I went through the old bugged Smoke Grenade like that, so I know roughly what it's like. The problem is that there really isn't anything in-between large-scale, slow control powers and small-scale control powers. It's either one enemy or all enemies. But what if I need to catch TWO enemies? Either alternate the hold, or AoE hold, which doesn't last long enough anyway. Alternating the hold, however would require me to get its duration to twice its recharge and a little over, but then that begins to take a significant toll of upkeep, both as time spent recasting it and endurance paid doing so.

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Is that good, is that bad, is that different? I'm not really going to judge. I don't think Dominators should be Controllers. But that's just me. Controllers certainly have plenty of damage, and both Doms and Blasters have an issue with powers that it is fatal to them to use. But that's really a balance issue.

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I guess the big thing for me is drastically low hit points, much lower than Blasters, which necessitates even MORE control to keep from getting killed. They don't seem to have that much more control, but rather they have larger-scale control. Which is cool when it's up, but its scale limits it to only occasional use. What about the time when these powers aren't up, though? Do I simply idle until they recharge? Because I have neither the hit points nor the mitigation to stand up to certain factions, and pulling doesn't always work. And even when pulling works, it's SLOOOOOOOW! Slow enough for me to abandon a character over if that's the only way he could fight.

SOs helped, and I'm hoping Wormhole will help. Gravity Distortion Field + Power Boost is also pretty cool, for the rare occasions I remember to use it, too

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The nice thing about Control sets is, they're consistent, while Blaster Secondaries aren't (try locking down a foe with Fire Manipulation ) and more importantly, they deal damage. The Dom doesn't just have a Secondary full of attacks and some holds, he has two sets with attacks, like a Blaster does. He now has a little bit better control, and a little bit worse damage. He can't make the burst damage a Blaster can with Build Up and Aim, but the Blaster doesn't have an AoE lock down. So I think it's fairly even.

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That's interesting. I keep hearing about Dominator controls dealing good damage and, truth be told, I'm seeing the numbers for them back this up, at least for single-target status effects. It worries me, though, that I won't have enough slots to put damage both in my out-and-out attacks AND in my holds. Besides, when they do barely as much as Power Bolt, I'm not sure it matters too much. Of course, if we're counting pure attacks from primaries, such as Propel or Lift, I guess I could get behind this. I don't have enough (read: any) experience with anything other than Gravity Control, but isn't the presence of genuine attacks in Control primaries more the exception than the rule?

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Even so, I find there is a big difference between stunning a foe, immobilizing him or knocking him down, or otherwise disabling his attacks, and actually holding him.

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I actually don't see a significant functional difference between holds and stuns, enemy resistances aside. About the only one is if you want to keep enemies into an effect with "Avoid" or keep them grouped up for AoE carnage, neither of which seems to be a Dominator speciality.

Now, my concern is that this additional stun capacity of Control sets comes in AoE form, meaning it has lower accuracy and padded recharge attached to it. These powers are useful, there's no denying that, but their usefulness is limited to when they're recharged, and I fear that may be a bit too little, given their timers.

Heck, it looks to me like Gravity Distortion is treated almost like a mini-nuke, and it doesn't last all THAT long even with slotting. Should I really be banking everything on Wormhole?

I guess, but even Wormhole doesn't look like it lasts very long and recharges in 90 seconds. I guess I could call that once per fight with slotting, but doesn't it still trade a bit too much for being a large-scale AoE? For instance, with Stunning Shot and Taser, I can keep two enemies almost permanently stunned. I say "almsot" because they don't exactly self-stack, whereas Gravity Distortion self-stacks by a fair bit, but I doubt that would be possible even with Wormhole. I suppose using it with Power Boost, itself on a 2 minute timer, could prove to be quite powerful, but I'm still a little unsure.

I've always wondered if status effects could work a little more like blasts. Say, a rapid-fire hold that lasts 10 second and recharges in two, but doesn't stack from the same caster? It just seems odd that it's either one, single person, everybody and nothing in-between.

I'm new to control-centric sets, this has to be said first and foremost. My only real encounter with the utility of control has been from some particularly control-heavy Blasters. I've always known that control for them (and, really, anything other than Controllers and Dominators) will only ever be secondary to killing the foe, and as such their control tools would have limited use, far inferior to that of REAL control sets. What I'm finding out so far, however, is that this doesn't appear to be exactly true.

Let me explain.

I'm used to Blaster control, which means largely single-target holds and stuns, and several of them, plus either an area denial power or an immobilize of some sort. Dominators (let's talk about them, as I've LITERALLY never played a Controller at all) seem to beat Blasters in the area of burst AoE control, as one would expect, but their superiority in single-target control that I was expecting to see plain isn't there. Now, many Blaster builds can afford to stack or double up on status effects. AR/Dev and Archery/Devices has two stuns, Electric/Electric has two holds, Just Energy Manipulation has two stuns, and Ice/Ice has THREE holds, with the possibility of extra holds and such from Epic pools.

Now, I've looked through a bunch of Dominator sets, and I've played Gravity Control up to almost 24, and... I'm not seeing more than one hold. In fact, I'm not seeing much in the way of hold at all. The framework seems to be single/AoE hold, single/AoE immobilize, possibly AoE stun, and then utility. Which would be really cool, were it not for I5's legacy of long recharge to short duration and crappy accuracy for AoE control powers. As it stands, AoE control in most sets is REALLY cool, but also REALLY rare, in the neighbourhood of once per battle up to several times per mission. This didn't become an issue to me until just a while ago.

Normally, my favourite approach of choice when my AoE hold isn't available is to hold one enemy and then immobilize the rest. This works GREAT when immobilization keeps melee enemies from beating me to death, but isn't nearly as effective when enemies don't really care and just keep on shooting with their full attack arsenal. Such as... The Council. In these situations, I find myself lacking anything that's in-between total spawn incapacitation and only a single enemy held, and this is where the lack of a second single-target status effect - say a stun so it doesn't stack as easily with the stock hold - would have come in handy. But I didn't have one. When a spawn has two dangerous lieutenants and I can't hold the entire spawn and all therein, I'm left with having to pick one to hold and one to take fire from.

Granted, few powersets have two holds in them (like Ice Blast) and most of the characters that have access to multiple, stacking effects do so by drawing from both of their powersets and from their Epics. Dominators don't really get to do that, though, as their secondaries are already an amalgam of two powersets to begin with, and in the process of mashing them together, status effects that the sets may have held were left out. After all, why have status effects in your secondary when you have an entire primary devoted to them? So I would assume the logic goes.

This leaves me at a quandary, however - what do I do when I need two enemies held, but don't feel like waiting four minutes? Holding one, waiting for recharge, then holding the other seems like an obvious solution, but this takes time and the hold doesn't self-stack by THAT much for it to be effective enough. When immobilization works and matters, the fast-recharging, though expensive AoE immobilize does prove very effective, but the situations where that is tryly meaningful dwindle as he levels go by. And... I struggle to think of any other solutions. What am I missing? What is there that's available to a Dominator which can approximate plain having two holds?

I guess I'm just running against yet another aspect of the binary nature of status effects in this game, and probably another reason to gripe when next that topic comes up, but at this time, I'm more interested in finding a practical solution than worrying about existentialist problems.

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So that means that to get the most out of it, you still have to slot 95% damage in attacks? Nuts, sometimes I didnt slot that much in favor of rech, end, or procs, because I knew Domination was going to help cover me part of the way. So everything else is the same, right?

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The base damage increase is better than a damage buff, because not only does it give you more damage overall, it actually makes enhancements and buffs over it more effective, as they're applied over a higher base. If you left enhancements off and relied on Dominaton to make up the difference, you're still going to be better off now, but enhancements now will increase your damage by more.

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I don't want the AI to be better at killing me. I want the AI to be more interesting to kill.

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this is a nice summary, Sam.
I agree.

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Here is the thing: The AI has to be better for the devs to do more interesting critters to fight.
Here is the bad thing: There are a lot of critters that were overpowered to compensate for horrible AI.
Mix the improved AI with the overpowered critters and you get issues like these. I think it's one of the reasons they avoided tweaking AI for so long, fear of retroactive buffs to these overcompensated critters. I am not sure how willing Castle will be to go back and fix the outlier cases. IF allowed, I can only foresee him doing so for extreme outliers that people bring up and not as an active pursue where he would be forced to decide what is overpowered.

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That's the age-old problem of game design. You can never really make enemy AI as smart as even a relatively dumb human, and most good gamers will be pretty smart. So the only alternative is to make them cheat. That, or script encounters like puzzle battles, which hasn't been done here outside of Trials and end-game raids/TFs/SFs. The AI will be stupid, but it will be incredibly powerful to compensate for its stupidity. However, when it DOES get smarter, it REALLY hurts.

Back five years ago, the Malta Group were designed to be a PITA, along with the Knives of Artemis. Remeber that mad 100, 1 second sleep dart that was purpose-designed to drop your toggles? Like that. After them, the Soldiers of Rularuu were designed to be even worse. Back in the days when Jack was still trying to achieve his 1 hero = 3 white minions, the only way to achieve that without reducing everything down into nothingness was to "buff the enemies." We got the Malta Group of I1, the Soldiers of Rularuu in I2 and the boss buff of I3, at which point the obvious futility of this approach became blindingly obvious. Then we got the GDN in I5 and ED in I6, which finally nailed it. Oh, sure, we also got Inventions in I9, which reintroduced the same old problems, but that's besides the point

There has been a history of providing challenge in this game by plain giving enemies more hit points, more resistance and stronger attacks. It works, on a purely theoretical basis, but it's not INTERESTING. I would generally not mind tough enemies if the only way to beat them wasn't to out-and-out overpower them. There seems to have been some thought given to this, when overpowered enemy groups were introduced, but given a "proper" way to fight them, or when enemies with great strengths, but also great weaknesses were made.

Well, Malta don't have any weaknesses that I'm aware, unless you count "isn't specifically strong at" as a weakness, nor do I see any "proper" way to fight them. Not any more, anyway. They're actually WORSE than the Rogue Vanguard in this respect. The Rogue Vanguard are stronger when it comes to raw power - they just output more damage and more debuff. But they're also highly melee-centric, which gives room for keepaway games. With Malta, you pretty much just have to shoot them all before your health depletes, which... Well, boring. It's boring even when it succeeds.

And worst of all, they don't give any extra experience to account for their being DESIGNED to be some of the strongest foes in the game.

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Once again, my complaint could simply be nullified, quite easily I might add, with just a little communication.

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This I agree with. Whether the bug is bad and whether it's easy to fix aren't as important as the fact that it's a highly visible bug, and as such would do well with being publicly addressed.

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Yes I suspect that is the OP's actual point about how 'wrong' it is to make a none pure concept build.

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Actually, I believe the OP's actual point was that people would break concept without an attempt at justification because some powers are just better mechanically, even if they don't make sense. You can think up any excuse and justification, but when this hasn't been done, it becomes a "why" moment.

And I have to agree. If you're going to break concept, at least put forward the effort to justify it. Put something in the bio, tweak something on the costume, the options are there.

Precisely. We need a higher-res version of the Metallic skin texture, because it doesn't look metallic... Or even like a texture. It's a pixellated blob.

I'm not sure that's a very accurate comparison, though. More appropriately, it would be like complaining about the order and being told that, to do it right, they'd have to buy a new oven. Which they should, obviously, but it's not something that can be done while you sit and wait for it to be accomplished. This goes more into maintenance than service, and that sort of thing takes both time and money. Whether it should be higher priority or not is another question entirely.

As for the practical side of things, it seems that chat is intercepting in input stream that it shouldn't be. That it's intercepting it at all tells me that it NEEDS to for some reason we're not aware of, and weeding keyboard input out of it appears to be a tricky problem to fix. That's me more or less blind-guessing, but it seems reasonable to my eyes. The point is that oftentimes bug with simple and obvious effects can be difficult to reproduce consistently and have causes that aren't trivial to fix without either undoing a recent change, which has presumably done because it was desired, or rooting through a complicated house of cards of interdependent systems. The bigger a project becomes, the more of a pain it is to change things without messing up other things and... Well, we get unintended side effects like keyboard input piling into a stream that gets dumped in the chat line on activating it. The chat bug.

Of course, its not having been fixed isn't evidence to its difficulty or complexity, as typos literally trivial to fix have remained in the game, reported time and again, for years due to fixing typos being rock bottom priority.

A hand grenade powerset, then? I'm not sure I could go behind this. I mean, sure, Bomberman is cool and all, but it doesn't quite work to a sufficiently... Cool level to have a chap go around lobbing grenades as his only power. I'm not sure a grenade launcher would be something I could support. Grenades as a complement to a rifle goes hand in hand. After all, some actual real life rifles come with a single-shot grenade launcher attached.

I guess I could see a revolving drum launcher with different types of ammo. Prototype had an interesting take on this, where it was a grenade launcher in name only, and actually launched something like high-calibre kinetic rounds. It could even be fun to play around with, with it being given incendiary grenades, explosive grenades, kinetic rounds, a beanbag clone, a couple of missiles and even an auto-fire version. 9 powers may be a stretch to work with, but with all the different types of grenades in the game (before we even get into cloning Trick Arrow effects), it shouldn't be TOO hard.

The real problem is that it becomes only a somewhat modified version of Assault Rifle, which has 40mm shell instead of a buckshot, an AoE grenade salve instead of Full Auto, an incendiary grenade instead of a Flamethrower and so on and so forth. It's another gun, essentially, and given the call for new powersets, I don't see that happening. If we ever get even remotely close to having another rifle, I can almost guarantee that would be an energy weapon, likely an extension of the Robotics Pulse Rifle.

A grenade launcher blast set is a lot like a two-handed sword melee set - it's cool in concept, but too close to an existing powerset to be viable.

Again, I agree that it's been around for far too long and is indeed very much annoying. I'm just not sure it's annoying enough to be "fed up with it." I would certainly very much like to see it fixed, and find it more than a little silly it's been left in this long, but I can't see myself getting angry when it happens. Maybe I'm just lucky to avoid facing it that often, I don't know.