Arcanaville

Based on the activity level I saw, I would have been surprised to see him not get the ten thread table.

What if their first twenty levels are roleplayed as being in the past, and then as they pass through the portal to Primal Earth instead of ending up in the Primal Past, a portal malfunction somehow yanks them instead to the Primal Present, and they have to deal with the disorientation of knowing that the Praetoria they knew was destroyed during the war with Primal Earth. That would seem to be fertile roleplaying ground.

Maybe Nemesis invaded the tutorial zone on the Rikti homeworld.

This scene definitely felt like JW. He loves him some kick-a** women, and he also loves matter-of-fact dialog embedded in otherwise unusual situations.

According to the Origin of Power and the Incarnate story line, that's sort of true.

No, but its worth noting because its not likely to be controversial to state that faster travel reduces the penalty of dying, and decreasing damage output lengthens fights which benefits the characters with better survivability. So all other things being equal, using veteran attacks and ninja run should slightly mute the difference between a blaster and a stalker, if the stalker was intrinsically more survivable to start.

At the moment ninja run can only contribute to a small differential in death, so its probably worth no more than a couple minutes tops. Its less clear how sands of mu affects things, although it will largely become a non-issue probably before level 20 regardless.

Because some people believe that while anything is possible for superheroes, how they conceive of them is the only important thing. So the occasional magic themed thing is ok, as long as its not too much of a distraction from the legitimate stuff.

Like mutations, which somehow generate physics-breaking abilities. Or scientific processes that defy all science. Or technology that works on the principle of "I say it, so it happens." Or the natural heroes, for which the supernatural is normal.

You know, the definitely not magic stuff.

Corruptor Blizzard Scourges.

To the best of my knowledge, the critter AI has no awareness of endurance, and no way to budget it. They'd burn their end down to the point of detoggling themselves if they could, which is why so few critters actually have genuine toggles.

Not even the devs have the ability to just randomly add slots to a character in general.

I'm more interested to know what the devs were on that evening.

But you know I still haven't gotten an answer to my question yet. Which is that while everyone was focused on the fact the test was run without the purple patch, I asked dozens of times why, and how, the devs were testing the Super Reflexes build with two more enhancement slots than everyone else. Which they never even acknowledged, much less corrected.

True, there are circumstances when it would be useful. I was thinking it would overall hurt more than help in most teams though.

I suppose in a strict logical sense anything that helps you solo and has the same effect on a team will by definition help sometimes, even if that sometimes is when the team otherwise wouldn't be helpful to you. I think the loophole though is that without explicitly stating so there might be effects which benefit the solo player and hurt his team mates, which in the degenerate case of having no team mates is a net plus and in most teams is a net minus. Either way, though, as I said previously it seems unlikely the devs would stumble into one by accident, it would have to be deliberately engineered that way.

I gave up on binds when I realized I wanted totally different ones for different alts, and it was too much work to remember which ones were which for which alts. I only have a few relatively universal binds. I have a teleport bind for everything with teleport that shift-clicks. Alt-click will deploy whatever the most commonly deployed location targeted power that alt has, if any. G does a target_enemy_next, R either toggles on superspeed or toggles forward/up on a superjump alt (I don't have anything with both superspeed and superjump).

I also bind P to take both a screencapui 0 and screencapui 1 screen capture, so I always get one with and one without the UI visible whenever I take a capture (although some old alts I haven't gotten around to back porting that, and still use P = screencap with no UI, Shift+P = screencap with UI).

I was thinking turn as in rotate about the nose-axis. I almost said bank, but that seemed odder.

For me, its because I have a stealth IO in there and stacked with superspeed that makes me invisible. If I need to stealth something, or I'm on a team that's stealthing something, its useful to have that within easy reach.

However, and conversely, I'm a mouse-clicker and less so a keyboard short cut player. So I click my powers in the tray. If I put a frequently used power in slot one, there's a chance I might slip up in the middle of combat and accidentally click the tray arrow. So every single power in slot one in the first three trays are powers that I toggle off and on occasionally, but do not actually click off and on in the middle of combat. I've found that works well for me. Every once in a while I discover in the middle of combat that I have sprint toggled on. That means at some point in that fight I did in fact drift a bit and click the wrong thing, and if sprint wasn't there that wrong thing might have jumbled my trays.

I have theories, but I don't really understand the motivation. The defensiveness projected is always counter-productive to any possible motivation.

I proposed a theory long ago in a USENET forum that people do not have conversations with other people on discussion groups and forums: the medium is too slow. So people have conversations with mental models of the participants instead, of which the groups contain only a subset thereof. The actual conversations contain far more discussion than actually ends up in the shared medium, but its mostly opaque to the participating parties.

This actually seems to be a remarkably powerful expository conjecture.

I went Energy/Energy/Force, and I end up running CJ+Weave+Tough+TempInvuln+Hover most of the time. It works: I end up with 18-20ish defense, 24-25ish when Power Boost is up.

Its really more relying on KB for its mitigation: the build has 157.5% global recharge, and gets even more because I slot Force Feedback everywhere, particularly in AoEs.

I elected *not* to take Power Burst. The reason has to do with Energy's almost flat DPA. Factoring in Arcanatime, the DPA of bolt, blast, and burst is 0.84 DS/sec, 0.8874 DS/sec, and 0.9447 DS/sec. Burst is the highest, but not by much: its about 6% better than Blast and 12% better than Bolt, but it also has very short range which means its often unusable unless you get into its range and stay there. And with KB, you will be pushing things away from you.

I did take Boost Range, and it can easily be made perma. With BR, Bolt, Blast, and Explosive Blast all have about 128 feet of range, which is pretty far away: not only can I engage from farther away, I can continue to engage targets I've knocked farther back and I can also use torrent at up to 64 feet away, which means I have a wider theoretical cone at a distance.

Its a very special-purpose build: spam attacks as fast as possible. AoE ends up being pretty good just by virtue of the high recharge, but its also good for escaping mez since bolt and blast alone are almost a continuous attack stream: I can use them while mezzed to either kill or at least knock down most attackers and mezzers trying to kill me. But its more of a starting place to see where you actually want to go. If I was going to make progeny of Hero-1, I might consider going more blapperish, and getting a lot more mitigation instead. But it depends on what you actually want to play.

As to whether Energy/Energy blaster is the best choice, again that is more a question of what you want to play, but if I was thinking about that, another possibility that comes to mind is Energy/Invuln Brute pre-Riktification, and Mind/Energy Dominator post-Riktification (the son of Hero-1 and Lady Jane *post* Riktification? Hey, its not my story).


Incidentally, Force of Nature only crashes endurance. City of Data tends to be more accurate than the text descriptions of the powers.

You keep thinking I'm trying to prove you wrong, when I'm still trying to see if you're saying anything specific at all. Which I've come to the conclusion you're not.

The counter problem is that many mobs also run *towards* the player and that shouldn't always happen either, but that benefits melee the most.

No, this is me saying when you say you agreed with anything Jack said, that doesn't mean a lot when you don't remember anything he said.

Saying you think he was almost always right, except you can't remember anything he ever said, is a peculiar assertion in general to make. It has nothing to do with whether you're lying or "guilty" and more to do with the fact that statement has no meaning.

The fact that Beast Mastery is either buggy or underperforming is a Beast Mastery issue. Anyone coupling that to Staff Melee, and the thread started as a staff melee complaint, is dictating release terms to Paragon Studios based on testing information they may not have the full details about. Closed betas were intended, among other things, to explicitly deal with that sort of thing. Closed beta testers are explicitly told, among other things, that they may be asked to test things that are not going to be released for an indeterminate time for any reason at all, and their testing of it should not imply the devs intend to release it immediately, or even at all ever.

When I turn my head 50 degrees, the floor maps vanish.

Also, the last time I ran TPN I searched for half an hour to find the giant V near the entrances, and eventually just asked for teleport. I PMed Snow Globe a bug report.

True story: I helped Snow Globe capture those IDF inside maps. You can see where he told me to stand and wait for all the IDF to arrive while he took the screencap. I'm the blue one in the middle. I'm glad he reminded me to bring lots of awakens, it seemed to take him an awful long time to get just the right shot.