Hopeling

Well, you get a token every month now, instead of a vet badge every 3, so it should be faster than 4-5 years, but unfortunately still probably too slow to reach t9 before Fire & Ice is rotated out.

Celestial will supposedly be available via another method at some point after it's cycled out. If Fire & Ice follows suit, the Phoenix wings will eventually be obtainable without being a t9 VIP. We don't yet know what that method is, though. The point is, the exclusivity won't last forever.

The Paragon Market has a bad interface. Almost unbelievably bad, for a supposedly professional product. It doesn't hide items you cannot buy, it doesn't tell you why you can't buy them if you try (it gives a cryptically unclear error message), the Back button forgets what page you were on, it has sort options but none of them are "newest first", the list goes on. It's just a mess.

I've always had a soft spot for Mutants & Masterminds, so... that one. Of course, that's a totally uninformed opinion since I just own a couple rulebooks and have never actually played it...

I hate to be the naysayer, since I'm as eager for i23 as anyone, but I doubt that Hybrid is going to be ready for release in the next couple weeks. Arbiter Hawk's latest discussed changes haven't even made it onto beta yet, much less tested sufficiently. And testing Hybrid at all is tricky, since you can only unlock it via Magisterium, and after the first few days of the beta it's become difficult to gather enough players on the beta server to run the trial.

Damage toggles aren't pseudopets, so no. I'm not sure about Burn, but I don't think it has that limit either.

Right, it's a 400% damage cap, but that includes the base 100%, so +300% of buffs/enhancements hits the cap.

Between Battle Axe and War Mace, the general consensus is that War Mace is better, but the sets are not wildly disparate.

Shield is better on a Scrapper than a Brute, as mentioned, but that doesn't mean it's bad on a Brute. You said you want to tank and don't want to give up much damage, which is pretty much a perfect description of a Brute. You will be less sturdy than a Tanker, of course, but there's a huge gulf between "less tough than a Tanker" and "not tough enough to tank at all".

Your first post asserts that people who wanted to play redside, but left because of low population, are the cause of the low population problem. I'm pointing out that red population has always been low, not just because of people eventually giving up and going hero. If red population wasn't low in the first place, people wouldn't feel a need to go hero.

I don't mean "popularity" as in "how much people like red side", I mean "how much people actually play red side", which is objectively measurable, and only indirectly a function of opinion. It is less popular ("less populated", if you prefer) than blue side, and always has been.

Blaming the players for being in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation is rather silly.

Red side was less populated even before side switching. The cause of red side being less popular is that it is actually less popular, although switching to the more populated faction has made it worse.

...and you know, Rogues exist for players that want to team with a lot of people but also play redside.

The Tsoo in DA actually use a naginata for their staff attacks already (or at least, something very like one, I don't know enough about weapons to be certain). It's... rather surprising we didn't get it, in fact.

I have not been playing at this time for the last few weeks, so possibly the trend changed, but Tuesday morning downtime has been pretty standard for several months.

So is the thread alive again, or are we trying to let it die? Eh, I'll just run with it.

Personally, I prefer to Walk when I'm not pretending to be a mighty hero with evil to fight (or a mighty villain with evil to commit). So, pretty much never. I did use it for the press conference at the end of SSA7, though. It would have felt silly to be sprinting around in there.

Parry doesn't take def debuff sets, because it doesn't debuff def (unlike other Broadsword attacks).

Depending on your secondary powerset and how much defense you have in the rest of your build, slotting Parry for defense ranges from "wildly unnecessary" to "still less important than slotting it for damage". It should be slotted as a proper attack, period. If you have any room left and want to slot it for defense too, you can do that as well.

Parry should generally be slotted as an attack. Its base damage is low, but if you're using it frequently for the defense buff, you'd be giving up a lot of damage by not slotting for it. Meanwhile, its defense buff is huge and usually doesn't need much enhancement (when you really need extra defense, it's easy to stack the Parry buff anyway). As such, any melee damage set is appropriate. If you want to enhance the defense buff, use a set that gives good bonuses with 4-5 pieces, and put a LotG or a generic defense IO or something in the last slot.

Since it's cheap and recharges quickly, you could also frankenslot it for acc/dam/def if you prefer.

Right... which means all the other benefits of VIP effectively cost $10. Is that bad somehow?

I like the idea of inspirations or a badge or some such for stopping muggings. Preferably, something that isn't attractive to farm, but that makes it feel like not a total waste of time to stop and help.

There are already quite a lot of substantial benefits for premium players as they climb the rewards tree. The devs WANT players to subscribe. That is, after all, how they make most of their revenue. So they offer various benefits to subscription, including some exclusive benefits, like Incarnate powers. Subscribing is supposed to be a very attractive option. If there's a feature someone wants from the game, and they want it enough to subscribe for it - great! Objective accomplished. If not Incarnate powers, what extremely desirable feature would you rather give up while premium to make VIP remain attractive to the game's best customers?

Yep, my flying KM stalker uses it without problems.

I agree, this would be a nice feature. Also, since Neuron and Bobcat's health bars already show up in a window, they should be targetable through that window.

How is incentivizing your long-term customers to stop being customers a way to display that you value their business?

For another thing, even as a t9 VIP (which I am), Incarnate abilities are not at all the only thing I get from subscribing. A VIP subscription has good value for most players. I broke down the benefits here in a previous thread on the topic. Even counting only the features that I personally care about, and ignoring VIP-only features like Incarnate stuff, a VIP sub was still advantageous. If you find it to not be advantageous, that's what the option to go premium is for.

The Celestial mace is pretty good, but it looks weird to me since they lengthened the haft.

10 inf seems pretty laughably small, especially since a large majority of players cannot use /ah at all.

I'm not violently opposed to the idea, but I can't recall ever having any social interaction at all in a Wentworth's, so I don't think it's a particularly positive thing either.

War Mace is quite excellent.

It is a bit short on good-looking weapon models, though...