Lazarillo

It's been a while, so I may be remembering this slightly off, but essentially, the problem is that the way this game does animation, to make a fully functional walking speed would require re-doing all the current combat animations and then give them special cases that say "do this when walking, do that when not". So since, as mentioned, this was a free-time project, it was decided it would just be simpler to disable powers, rather than re-code the entire dang game.

Such are the limitations of a game engine eight years old that was only designed to work certain ways.

i20 was just a touch over one year ago. And the post-50 game is made up of: 2 TFs, 8 extended missions, and 1 (rather small) zone. The pre-Incarnate game has, for reference...nah, screw it. "Too many to count" is a better way to put it. Incarnate content is so incredibly infinitesimal compared to the rest of the game that to balance anything other than Incarnate-related stuff around it is downright silly. Incarnate content should be balanced around the rest of the game, not vice-versa.

Reliable if you have at least two people running slotted Tactics is not necessarily "reliable".

Perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that it fails to make Snipes more desirable, which one would presume is kind of the point.

Okay...

Okay...

Okay...

and

D'oh!

To be fair, Snipes don't really have worthwhile secondary effects anyway (except maybe Beam Rifle, if you count the chance to spread Disintegration). Removing their range might be more thematically appropriate.

Even assuming raiding Portal Corps wouldn't be easy (and hey, it's something that's done pretty frequently...made easier by the fact that you don't have to worry about what happens when you come back), Arachnos has portal technology as well. And gaining access to do with it more or less as you please is as easy as buying couple tickets to the Johnny Sonata concert at the Giza this Saturday. Technician Naylor is a mighty easy bribe.

Then there's access to Ouroboros...

And even if we want to argue they're stuck on Primal Earth...still, so what? Okay, Tyrant invades, and decides to go after all the villains...which the heroes of Paragon have already been doing, unsuccessfully, for years.

So, yeah, there are plenty of potential ways for people who don't care to up and leave if things get shady.

Yeah, not that Dominators need the buff all that much, IMO, but this felt like a bit of a bait and switch. Wish they would've dropped the Snipe, kept the damage aura now.

Honestly? I find it pretty marginal. It's a nice opener, but not generally something I'm inclined to fire off mid-combat. And that's exactly what Snipes already are. Though that is, admittedly, playstyle and not numbers talking, and I'll admit that, so please, nobody, mistake me for being objective here.

However, that said, Build Up is also pretty effective at what it does out of the box, especially because with just a bit of set bonuses for Recharge (which are already going to be a fair draw for Blasters), it really can pretty much sit with its single slot and do its job.

A snipe, on the other hand, is going to need much more love in the slots department, and Blasters (and Dominators) tend to really need their slots in my experience. So I'm just not sure it's worth that for one attack, even if that one attack does really good DPA every 40 seconds or so.

As I said before, it's not like this change will "cost" anything to my Blasters who already took their Snipes. It's a welcome benefit that will be used every once in a while. But at the same time, it's not going to inspire me, for the most part, to take Snipes on characters who didn't already have them. Even the one exception I can think of, my BR/Devices, will be replacing an attack with the Snipe, rather than adding it to the aresnal, so to speak.

You know, this is an interesting point as well, and one I've sort of considered, but not from this angle: any ranged AT that attempts to get the buff is going to have capped accuracy against even-level enemies, will need less than one DO's worth of accuracy to cap against +1s, and will only need one Acc/??? IO for +2s. So in that regard, it does dramatically shift what people can slot for. Though whether that's enough to compensate for what has to be dumped elsewhere, I can't really say unless I mess around bunches in Mids.

The buffed snipe is not situational. Getting the buff, however, can be.

Ostensibly, these changes are to help Blasters, specifically, though the Snipe can help others as well. And that's where this change sort of falls flat. As noted, this'll massively improve them for Defenders and Corruptors, who are already, presumably, sitting pretty well. Not doing much for Blasters (or even moreso, Dominators), though.

I think part of the problem, rather, is that most villains don't even get to do that. I'd qualify Dean/Leonard as "comic book villain", and as others have noted, they are both great arcs. There are a few others in similar ranges (Mortimer Kal, Vincent Ross, and even the first 3-4 SSAs), however, there's nothing in the endgame for that. It's always just "tag along with the heroes", which isn't very convincing, especially given that a self-serving villain can just hop a portal to another world if things got particularly bad, anyway, so the whole "save the world, to rule it" is pretty shaky, too.

For Corruptors, ED-capped Tactics + Kismet, will hit around 21.6%, which is extremely close to the golden number already. Farsight would more than cover it.

So those very same melee attacks can be the high risk/high reward attacks. It won't hurt to extend the range on the high damage attacks. Archery's already had it since i5, and while Blazing Arrow may be awesome, it's not like it's brokenly so. If anything, I'd say a bigger range buff might be called for. Enemies can and will close 80 feet pretty damn fast.

IOs (other than the Kismet, which yes, gives ToHit despite its description) don't give ToHit bonuses, so you can't get it there. Tactics gives anywhere from 10.92% (for Blasters) to 19.5% (for Defenders) for the various ranged archetypes when slotted to ED-cap levels. So again, can't get it there.

"Punitive" may be overstating it, but it's sort of true that you have to waaaayyy overslot for all but the most extreme circumstances if you want the benefit. So you get a great single target power, yes, but it comes at the cost of slots. And personally, one of the reasons I don't like playing Blasters is because they're already probably the second hardest AT to slot for (for me, at least).

Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I think this Snipe change needs a little further tweaking.

For one, this does next to nothing to fix Snipes for Dominators. Yes, the changes are "Blaster"-focused, but it's a little annoying how back when people complained about Dark Assault getting Moonbeam, we were assured to just hang on because Snipes were getting better...and now the only Dominator Assault set that can buff its snipe is, um, Electric, I think? That and Thorns, but Thorns doesn't have a Snipe.

Second, the benefit is, as noted above, really on feasible if you're playing Devices (and even then, requires some pretty wacky slotting), or by using Build Up and/or Aim. Yet when do those get used most? Seems to me it's usually before fights for a good alpha, and that's the point where the long activation times and interrupts don't really matter.

So yeah, I'm just not feeling it. It's a cool concept, but I just can't see it being effective in a practical sort of way.

Most of the changes these days seem less focused on "value" and more on standalone plauability. See also: Vigilance. In that regard attempts to buff Blasters' survival rates makea sense. I don't think they need a value to teams buff much anyway because the game is generally designed for groups of just about anything to be effective.

I guess my thing with snipes is that a situational change just doesn't feel like enough to justify picking up another power that will need significant slotting on AT that's already kind of starved for them. They're still ultimately too situational. Don't get me wrong regarding the buff itself. My characters who already have Snipes will appreciate getting to use them more often, I'm sure. But it doesn't inspire me to take them on characters that haven't already found a way to fit them in.

Canonical Bane Spiders are really no better/different than Praetorian Seers. They're a giant psychic network of enforced obedience, effectively lacking in free thought. In that regard, they're more like machines than men.

Of course, that said, all of the VEAT paths tend to start falling apart in terms of story, under the slightest pressure. A VEAT can go full-hero before 24...and still end up with a Crab Spider backpack, for example. And canonically, all Banes are male, and all Fortunatas are female, no exceptions, because the selection is made based on gender in the first place. And for that matter...well, yeah, the point is, I could go on, but I think the point is made.

It's best to think of the VEATS as (initially) fresh recruits who just have the same training. By the time they're a high enough level to pick a "career", they're not really soldiers of Arachnos anymore anyway, they're full-fledged Destined Ones.

So the Battalion is Praetorian Ouroboros?
Just when we thought we were done...

From a "realistic" standpoint, it's strange, but when you consider the nature of the City of Heroes universe, it's less surprising. We know thanks to Cimerora that certain heroes, even those that aren't Incarnates, are sort of destined to be there, for lack of better phrase. So the fact that certain characters reappear despite how strange their presence is has less to do with the general likelihood/unlikelihood, and more to do with the fact that Fate (or the Well, or whatever) has declared them the "major characters of reality", or the like.