Kelenar

Yep, repel too. As I remember the original of what breaks sleep from waaaay back when it was changed, it's any power that causes a change in HP level (except regeneration) or moves the target (except teleportation, I think).


Edit: Aha! i2 patch notes. "Sleep can now only be broken with a Change in HP (Damage or Heal) , by a Knock Back (or KnockUp , KnockDown or Repel) or by a power that specifically does so (such as Empathy/Clear Mind)."

Pretty much. Plant puts most of its eggs into one basket, but boy, is it one hell of a basket.

This is my only problem with the i17 stuff. All the time you spend in conversations and reading computers, your team is basically milling around and missing the interesting bits... They're great missions solo, but I'm not sure how I feel about them on a team. Personally, with the way dialogue is basically hidden to anybody but the mission holder, it reduces my incentive to join teams for my first run through any new content by quite a bit. I say this as somebody who teams almost whenever possible.

As for the larger thread topic of power uses, well, people have already nailed it. You get XP for killing enemies, and almost every team and most solo characters can do that pretty well in most situations without doing things like scattering or caging them that just slow you down. It seems like a lot of powers were designed under the old design goals that death was something to be avoided at all costs. That simply isn't the case these days.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who wanted to slot it specifically because it would stun myself at random.

I found Earth/ a bit safer than Plant/ past level 25 or so, mostly because of Arachnos and Longbow Officers. When I ran into confuse-resistant bosses (or worse, the Longbow ones and their AoE confuse resistance aura) or high-defense Night Widows, my plant dom could hit a bit of a wall if I was short on insps, but the earth one would keep right on trucking. It doesn't quite have the every-single-spawn lockdown capability Plant/ has against other groups, but I found that it more than made up for that by letting me throw out however much I needed to get problem mobs to leave me alone.

... of course, heroside, I think Plant/ would come out ahead by a fair amount.

How was this XP-wise? I've been trying to get a feel for whether finishing missions as quickly as possible or killing lots of enemies gives better XP/time on a Stalker.

What about Impact?

I know I've heard people mention setting it up and then moving on or returning to the previous group. It might just be a matter of how far apart the spawns are spaced, though.

These outline my biggest problems with Time Bomb. If your team can't kill any spawn it's going to be more than an annoyance to in 24 seconds, something is weird.

Soloing, I suppose I can see some uses for mobs that you absolutely don't want to attack up front and there aren't any corners around for you to use to pull them over a patch of Trip Mines instead. But in most scenarios, anything it does can be more easily filled by Trip Mines.

The old-school Praetorian AVs do hint that the way they treat their citizens is, well probably not great. The original portal missions really do basically portray them as the Evil Twin Dimension.

This is a stance I've had to adopt, too. After years of coming up with cool concepts and then utterly contorting things to make the actual character vaguely resemble it, I've started considering what the game engine can do first, then what I want to do second. It saves on the disappointment and frustration.

Yeah, this is my experience. My blaster's entire outfit is yellow and black, and only using tights with patterns, so the secondary colors are displayed everywhere. My clone was... blue and black, I believe. Which actually looked pretty snazzy.

Good to know there's a fix incoming, at least. I encountered this problem for the first time this weekend... with nothing but an immobilize and a caltrops patch to protect my bots by keeping enemies at range, my young MM had a little trouble keeping them safe when they kept charging enthusiastically enough that you'd think they were brutes.

Truth. My Dark/Elec/Mu Brute is one of the few characters I haven't gotten totally bored with post-50, since I can always go to RWZ and solo some x8 Rikti missions. On top of the energy resistance, they seem a bit more vulnerable to end drain than most other groups (high end cost attacks, I guess?) For the attacks chipping away at my resists, I have Siphon Life and Energize. The lack of AoEs doesn't even really hurt that much, since saturated Soul Drain (frankenslotted for decent damage) plus Ball Lightning and Lightning Field mows through the minions pretty quickly, and the primary has plenty of ST damage for the bosses. It's not Shield Charge or Fire/Kin quick, but very little is.

And you'd start off beholden to Longbow. And have several points where you only do things because Longbow threatens to beat you up otherwise. And many missions insinuate that your entire goal with her heroing career is to impress Longbow enough to work for them. And you get to level 40 to work for high-level members of Longbow. And... yeah. They could retcon Arachnos out of existence tomorrow and I'd have no issues.

I find it hilarious that heroes still pretty much never fight Arachnos. Paragon City and the Rogue Isles are at war, and it's, like, a minor inconvenience for Paragon at best, judging by the heroside content.

My name is Kelenar and I approve this message.

Pretty much this. I wouldn't be totally opposed to it if having paid expansions meant they could give us a lot more stuff, but altogether, I'm happy with the model of having regular, incremental updates. When the issue releases are in full swing (i.e., pretty much any time except the months before a paid expansion hits,) there's always content that's been added within the last few months. Keeps things feeling fresh, if only a little.

Ah yeah, I'd forgotten he had that. Well, like you said, it doesn't seem to show up anywhere else.

Oh, and it looks like Siphon Speed's debuffs are unresistable, too.

Eh, depends a lot on the primary. I have Defenders (note the plural) that can safely jump into melee range against spawns that are more dangerous than anything some of my Scrappers can handle.