EvilRyu

What are these new paragon protector elites you speak of?

Can we get a red name to post what powers these guys get for the individual henchemen?

Thanks for the update CuppaJo. This was a very needed fix for us especially with issue 7 around the corner. Now if we could only get all the Pet AI fixed that would be great.

In a PM from Cuppajo she has asked me to try to get a situation where I can get the hijacked pet bug to happen 100% of the time. I will be doing some testing this weekend. If anyone on the Virtue server has a lowbie mastermind look for me this weekend My name will be Hara-Kiri Hokage. At least we might get this thing finally looked at. If you prefer to do some testing on your own please post your results in this thread.

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On PAR?

No. Just no!

Additionally, you do know that click buffs are getting expiration warnings (blinking or something) in I7?

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I read that somewhere on the forums too, but I will believe it when I see it. They better give us like a 15 second warning or it wont be worth it.

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agreeing with BurningChick re: EvilRyu!

How can you possibly discuss Scrapper history without mentioning criticals, and then lt/boss criticals?

I mean really.

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The reason I did not discuss criticals is because that is something you almost no control over as to when and when you dont get them. You can only up your chances of crits by killing bosses, the only thing crits really did was push us more into the boss killing role because crits encourage boss killing. The second damage buff we got is pretty much non-existant now due to ED. You wont really see the benefit of it without outside buffs.

I never really considered regen overpowered even back in issue 2. I looked at it like this you go thru 28 levels of hell just to finally get a power that puts you on par with all the other scrappers. The early regen game sucked bad before intergration got healing. After the issue 3 changes I never did any task forces, soloed and dueoed with a close friend all the way to 28. Anytime I teammed before 28 it was instant death due to bad players. After the loss of toggle instant healing, I found myself relying on dull pain, instant healing and mog just to get by because your regular healing just is not good enough. This is where I see there is a problem with the set. Having to be so clicky just to live just does not fit my play style. I hate the fact that you have to count how long before your buffs expire to know if you need to run or not. Seriously with ED in place I can see that they should change a few things back, either make all of regen fully enhanceable or give us back toggle instant healing.

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Yeah, Since Issue 2, Scrapper's main problem is GETTING dev attention.

Don't worry regen scrappers.

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Are you kidding? Some poor regen scrapper accidentaly taunted the devs, and the entire secondary hasn't been able to lose dev agro for the last handful of issues.

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The problem with Regen as a secondary is that the manner in which it was implemented inherently doesn't scale; ignoring the deaths from taking a ton of damage in a single alpha strike, healing quickly as a defense breaks down to two categories: if you regen faster than you're taking damage, you look godlike, and if you take damage faster than you regen, you're dead if you can't drop opponents quick enough to move into the other category. Everything the devs have done to the powerset has just run the breakpoint back and forth, and there's a very fine line between survival and faceplanting (and it's far too easy to go quickly from 'fine' to 'debt' if you judge things wrong).

If you took Instant Healing and changed it so that it made each hit act like illusory damage -- i.e., for each hit you take, a second or two after the hit you 'instantly healed' part of the damage, then what you'd have would be a defense that would scale the same way that Resistance and Defense did, and could be balanced against them -- 40% Resistance, 40% Defense, and 40% Instant Healing would all, over time, protect a character from 40% of the incoming damage. Unfortunately, doing a rework this fundamental to a powerset seems to be more than what the devs are willing to do, since it would entail rebalancing the other powers in the set as well.

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I have even suggested this myself as a better fix for regen, it actually fits the name better than the current instant healing does. This would finally balance invuls and regens on similar ground. Our main toggle would still be integration because without it we would still die like invuls do when they get overwhelmed.

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So I got bored and pondered.

You know how Tankers tend to complain that they often don't get anything from the Devs, while Scrappers seem to revel in the splendor that is yummy stuff?

I think it deals with population amounts of characters. The more played Archtypes are put into the queue ahead of others when it pertains to fixes and new stuff.

Yes? No? Pie?

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You need to get your facts straight. If anything the devs would seem like they hate scrappers not like them best. No AT has gone thru as many drastic changes and nerfs as much as scrapper have. Tanks are actually a little lower now than scrappers were back in issue 3 as far as stats go. If you look at all of what scrappers went thru can you still say they are liked more?
First we had the resist cap change a very unneeded change, this was before we had sonic defenders in the game so it was not like anyone short of an invul scrapper could actually still get 90% resist. So what was the point of the change? It is not stepping on the tankers toes because you are looking at 3 minutes at most for this so called G4WD-M0D3. That is hardly tanking at all. Along with this change we lost perma-unstoppable along with tankers so no net change there.

Next was the regen stealth nerf on intergration, all that partial enhancement heal crap. Next we lost perma-mog and perma-elude. Although this did not hurt regen too badly this change butchered SR. This made you have to take the passives and aid self if you wanted any chance of real survival. A little before this time they butchered invincebility, this power has been changed so many times I cant even tell if it works or not. If they could make it work on all damage -psionics like the way it did before issue 3 but not stack with itself then we might have something worthwhile. But as it is now you get little benefit from this power as a scrapper and alot of unneeded aggro. I could if they removed the aggro portion of the power from scrappers then it would not be stepping on tankers toes with that.

Finally we have issues 5 and 6. We lost almost everything that made us not squishie. As it is now the only thing that seperates us from the squishies is the sleep portion mez protection because some squishies can get higher resist and defense than we can. Issue 5 added damage buff change was just a slap in the face because they gave us damage they would be just taking it back in issue 6 when this ED madness came into the game.

So after reading this do you still see scrappers as being the favorite??? I know tankers when thru alot of things, I was there for that too because I got tired of being nerfed as a scrapper so I switched to tanking. Now that everyone other than stone-tankers are squishie or semi-squishie you might as well play as a squishie now.

I got to test this myself, If I can do a mission and not kill myself with energy tranfer we finally have something here.

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There is nothing particularly overpowered about stalker EM.

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You're crazy.

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Given the fact that all the EM attacks suck except the last 2 what do you expect? I have played as an Inv/EM tanker and it was a hard road. Can you imagine only being able to tickle your enemies to death for 35 levels? The only way they could nerf EM they would have to totally redo the set, and move the powers around because the attacks are pretty weak as they are until ET and TF.

Ok, hell has frozen over a pvp nerf to help pve. I have seen it all now. Well while we have you here can you explain the mastermind personal force field change and the upcoming buff we might be getting. Is it Pet-voke or not?

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Simply increasing the base damage is dangerous, and we can't make it exempt from ED.

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Wait... you guys can make powers exemp from ED?!?

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Nope. That's why I said "Can't." Well, actually, we could ask for new code to do that, but it isn't really something we want currently.

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But the better question is why not make some powers exempt from ED? ED has opened another can of worms and created alot of situations you guys never even thought about. Currently I can list a ton of powers that were screwed over by ED and a whole AT that was destroy by it. The whole AV to EB endurance bump could be solved by exempting end mod from ED. Also I would like to know what you have done exactly about the endurance bump. We are days away from issue 7 so you just tell us it wont hurt anything will it?

Not sure if anyone touched on this but, what will the animation for this power be? if it is that generic colon cleansing exam look that EM and MA have then they can keep dark melee .

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Castle, you know now that you've posted in two threads with this title, it's going to appear in every AT forum on the board right?

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Actually, you're right. I think it's also against board policy to 'call out' a dev in your post title. I think that means I've been bad by actually responding. I'll have to stop doing that.

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I know calling out a devs is against the rules but there no other way to do this. If there is a way that a forum user can ask a specific dev a question and let everyone see the response and have a chance to respond to your response let us all know. Sort of kind of like that ask a dev series thing but actually get responses in a timely manner. Problem I had with the ask a dev series is that it took forever to get responses from that dev and half the time they picked the easy questions to answer. As I see it now the only way to fix alot of this stuff is to do 1 of 2 things. One is have Statesman to hire people for to be AT reps for each AT. Have them to have a manditory amount of hours on the message boards that is used to read and respond to our posts. I think a mininum of 5 hours a week on the message boards is not asking for too much. If this is done we all get what we want, you devs get a deeper understanding of the game from the player point of view, we players get a better understanding of what "The Vision" is. Options #2 is just make 10 more clones of _Castle_. Step 1 clone _Castle_. Step 2 ???. Step 3 Profit $$$. I am kind of partial to option #2 because I know in doing that we would definately get everything accomplished faster. If we get either option the game will be so much better than it is now.

Ok I was like how the hell did my thread get here, but then I went back to the first posting and realized it was not my thread.

OMG I cant believe I forgot to ask this.

8. What power is on the chopping block in place of assasins strike?
9. Will we keep shadow maul?

I am glad it will be a resist set, finally a stalker that can take a hit without dying so fast after an assasin strike . I know defense will be getting buffed but even then I dont see it making too much of a difference given there is always that 5% of getting completely owned.

Thanks again _Castle_.

I know most of the details concerning issue 7 changes and upgrades are kind of secret till it hits test server. I wanted to know could you at least tell us what you can about dark melee and dark armor for stalkers.

I have a few questions.

1. Will dark armor be a resist based set or will it be just defense like most of the other stalker secondaries?
2. Will we get touch of fear?
3. Will stalkers get build up in place of soul drain?
4. Since stalkers already get hide at lvl 1 will they be getting cloak of darkness as well?
5. Will they have the same knockdown penalty as the other dark armor scrappers have dealt with?
6. How will powers such as cloak of fear, oppressive gloom, and death shourd work for dark armor? This one has really been on my mind because the whole point of being a stalker is being undetectable most of the time so to me those powers while good as they are would be counter productive to being a stalker.
7. Will we also get that gawd awful lvl 38 power they call a rez?

How about this instead, they turn faultline into a +40 zone and have those contaminated guys running around in there. That zone is basically going to waste anyways and usually by then everyone will have 2 travel powers or they will have help to get around in there.

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Story in a nutshell:
Trick Arrow used to have 4 Targeted AoE powers. That made using the set incredibly difficult (although, it was pretty cool.) During the test period, we decided to change 2 powers to standard AoE attacks. Poison Gas Arrow was one of them.

Originally, Poison Gas Arrow would leave a large pool of gas that lasted almost a minute. Any critter entering the gas cloud would be debuffed and a small chance of being put to sleep every quarter of a second. When we changed it to a normal AoE, though, the chance to sleep was left at it's original level. While that was fine for a power activating 4 times a second, for a one shot chance, it was patheticly (sp?) low.

So, I increased the sleep chance to a 'better' value. It's still not 100% of the time, but you should get between 50% and 66% of minions when it lands.

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This is another example of how you guys have almost no clue as to what is balanced for us. This set could not have been uber in no way shape or form. First off sleeps are pretty much worthless unless you solo. Everyone has and uses AoE attacks. We need new forms of mezzing. Trick arrow set should just be removed and rethought out. As a whole it does not bring much to the team. It does not do anything special that the other sets dont already do. Just look at your game data, we will never see an army of trick arrow defenders, controllers, or even masterminds.

Positron can you at least tell us what the level requirement for the change over will be. That way we can at least get some toons up to that level to test this as soon as it goes to test server. Also will there be anything we will loose such as powers, enhancements(specifically HOs) or currency of either game?

Since there does not seem to be any hope that ED will ever go away, I was wondering if there will be any changes to flight enhancements or a buff to flight speed? I think that it is kind of crazy that it is the only travel power that can not reach its top speed without buffs. Also I really miss my 6-slotted hover. If any forum users read this post have you had any pm response concerning any possible change to the flight pool?

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The 100 mag stun imo was created to prevent herding of long bows. I see any mob with over 20 in a group getting 900percent tohit buff or 100 mag stun.

[/ QUOTE ] I just cant see how this was true, there is now way anyone can survive more than 5 of them so herding is out of the question. You come out better as an invul trying to herd master illusionist.

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Pretty cool to have a mob with a 100 mag stun in the game. When will this be fixed to a normal stun magnitude to avoid toggle droping even if you are running Unyielding and have Thaw, Antidote, Increase Density, and Clarity on you. Yes I saw where Castle said their stun is being replaced...how about a time frame, or implementing it sooner than fixing badges ?

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It was fixed awhile ago. It should reach you guys in the next patch or two.

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What about the bosses that summon spectral terrors and phantom armies +12 to the casters level??? When will those get fix? As it is now fear resist do very little against something like that. Also Family bosses are still doing that thing where they summon singularities way too high as well. Please check these bosses. I should not have to lay down +14 trip mines and pull the boss into them just to kill this boss. I feel like I am cheating when I do this.

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I say we give _castle_ an overload of pms on this subject he would respond to our cries for help hopefully.

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though castle is the man. such suggestions are more harmful that good. i know you say this in jest but some people are normal and might not understand. lets not punish a man for being helpful to us.

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Believe me the last thing I want if is for _castle_ a.k.a. God's Gift to the melee class arch-types to be punished. It is just that he and CuppaJo are the most responsive of the rednames and they try to understand us. Had we had him as a rep when we went thru all of this during issue 3 we might not have even had this debuff issue to begin with. I say we clone _castle_ and cuppajo that way we dont have to share them with the other arch-types?? All in favor of _castle_ and cuppajo clones say /signed.