Lothic

I know many people cite the Illusionists badge as "public enemy number one" as far as which badge needs to be reduced the most. But to be honest I could probably rattle off a few dozen badges which are a lot harder to earn than that one.

It's very possible that badge will be one of the ones lowered by Synapse just based on how much "negative press" it gets. But really it's not one of the ones I'd bother with if I had any control over which badges to pay attention to. *shrugs*

It's possible there may be a few idiots out there like that, but I don't think it'll happen as much as you'd think.

Case in point I earned Empath about a month before Posi finally got around to lowering the insanely high 1 billion HPs healed requirement. Now obviously when I first learned about that reduction I had a moment where I thought to myself, "Heh, that figures..." But I never once jumped out here on the forums and whined or ranted about it because I knew that change was very looooog overdue and very justified.

In fact there were many people over the years (including myself) who publicly stated on these forums that even though they had the billion HPs Empath done that they would be in favor it being lowered because that requirement was silly-stupid from day one regardless. I suspect that this testimony from these badgers were part of the reason Posi finally decided to lower the requirement. Let's just suffice it to say I -never- believed his excuse about it being a "decimal point typo" that took 4 years to fix.

So will it be momentarily annoying for me to learn that maybe other badges like Immortal or Leader end up being reduced? Sure it will. But again I wouldn't complain about it here because I realize that there are badges like that out there which are unfairly beyond the reach of most people who play this game. Obviously I hope that they don't make top badges too trivial to earn, but there are at least a few like that which could be fine tuned without too much objection.

I've always been a strong advocate for Power Customization in general and I'm very much looking forward to having I16 go live. But to be honest Kheldians -not- being customizable doesn't really bother me all that much.

I imagine your reasons #1 and #2 are a large part of why it's not happening right now, but I wouldn't discount the significance of your reason #3 too much. The fact that Kheldians are actually a unique race of beings with specific powers makes the idea that all of their powers would always look the same seems reasonable to me. So while I'm torn by the idea that we should be able to change things regardless I really don't have a strong objection to the idea that all Kheldians look the same by default. *shrugs*

Basically if it happens for Kheldians that'd be fine, but if it doesn't it'd be (at least for me) fine too.

Back when they first came out they were set up to have 10 HPs and -75% damage resistance. I suppose it's always possible they eased up on the resistance penalty, but they never had "good" defenses to begin with.

I'll admit the flight poses are not trivial to use right out of the box so to speak. But I have them keybound to buttons on my mouse and I've been using them regularly every time I play for years now. In fact using them is pretty much an unconscious habit for me at this point.

As we all know this topic has gotten rehashed every few weeks for years in this forum.

One of the last times I got into one of these threads I summarized a workable implementation for a Walk power for CoX that avoided most of the problems BAB has mentioned would be hang-ups for it. Basically it goes like this:

1) Create a clone of the Sprint power which instead of boosting a character's run speed it would reduce it.
2) Cut-n-paste the current NPC "walk forward" animation into this power so that it looks good while moving forward.

Done. That's all that we -actually- need for this.

Now of course the obvious criticism of this is that you could say "well that would look silly if you tried to move in any other direction except forward. It'd be like a weird slow motion run animation." To that I would agree - a Walk power implemented as I suggested would look a bit silly if you tried to move any other way than forward. But my answer to that is two-fold:

1) So what? People who are going to use this power are typically only going to use it in non-combat RP situations. We don't really NEED new animations for this thing to cover movement scenarios that will very rarely if ever happen.

2) I hate to rub BAB's nose in this but implementing a Walk feature EXACTLY the way I have described is EXACTLY the way Champions Online has done it. It works and looks perfectly acceptable like that in that game.

So while I realize BAB would prefer to give us a fully tricked out version of Walk with all sorts of dedicated animations for it I contend that that kind of complexity is actually not required to satisfy what we really want out of this. BAB has perhaps deluded himself into thinking this thing has to be more difficult than it really has to be.

Yeah I've heard of people being able to PL characters from 1 to 50 in around 30 hours for -years- before the AE even existed. AE didn't create the possibility for stupid-fast PLing, all it did was speed it up a little more. This is why I've never been impressed by people who boast having dozens of 50s because if that's your only goal pretty much anyone could have dozens of 50s in a matter of weeks. *shrugs*

Well at least I16 is finally going to eliminate the ability to bridge. That's obviously not going to stop all PLing completely, but it'll at least slow it down enough so that most people might decide it takes too long to bother with.

As I implied before people have been regularly suggesting pretty much exactly this as an idea to replace GF for well over 5 years now. I'm willing to accept the reality that if they haven't bothered to replace GF by now they likely never will. *shrugs*

I agree that GF has always needed some serious fixes to make it work better but there's nothing really wrong with the basic concept. I suspect the Devs would finally get around to fixing GF long before they outright replace it with any kind of "superfast fly" no matter how limited/balanced it would be.

But based on what the Devs are doing in I16 with adding powers to the epic power pools (many of the pools that only have 4 powers are supposed to be getting a new 5th choice to choose from) it might be possible that they would eventually add a 5th choice to the travel power pools as well. This way instead of GF being "replaced" we might get something "added" to the pool as a new alternative.

I've actually used GF with a Fire Controller with Imps.

I did that more as a novelty than a necessity though. I'd guesstimate that after several years there was maybe only 3 or 4 times where using GF to get the Imps up to bad guys was the easiest way to tackle the situation.

People have often suggested a "Superfast Fly" as a replacement to GF but it seems clear that the Devs aren't willing to make Super Speed pointless in any way. *shrugs*

Posi let that slip in a tweet a few days ago.
It was supposedly meant to be in a patch note but apparently fell through the cracks or some-such.
I think it's supposed to apply to all pets, not just MM henchies.

Did you get it the first day I15 went live? That was basically the last time I tried it. My Peacebringer is not my primary badger so I was not highly motivated. It was sort of on the "it'll happen when it happens" level for me. I guess it was fixed some time since then so I suppose I'll give it another try.

Actually this is a fairly reasonable and legitimate question.

Up until now just about the only semi-realistic way to dismiss the 36 and 48 month Vet pets was to zone. While I'm all for the idea of allowing pets to persist while zoning that improvement does highlight this lack of direct pet control.

I have always wanted a manual command to be able to dismiss Vet pets the same way we can dismiss other pets. It would seem that the Devs could produce a new command line command that could accomplish this. Since we can only have one 36 month pet and one 48 month pet the command could be named something like "/dismiss_vetpet 0" for the 36 month pet and "/dismiss_vetpet 1" for the 48 month pet. This would allow the command to be easily bindable and open ended in case any other Vet pets ever get released.

Tried to do that trick with two Peacebringers the first day I15 went live and it didn't work. I had heard the whole Septad thing was having trouble with Kheldians in general. It hasn't been a real priority for me but since the topic is being discussed has this been fixed yet so that Kheldians can get this badge?

The Devs have specifically told us in the past that they avoid openly telling us exactly what the criteria are for closed beta selections on purpose. They realize that if they told us exactly what to do to qualify for them then everybody would bend-over-backwards to do those things and they'd have a million people gumming up the works.

The Devs were free to tell us about being 60+ month Vets for the Going Rogue closed beta because there's nothing you can actively do to become one of those other than just being one of those in the first place. You can't "cheat" yourself into becoming a 60+ month Vet.

Closed betas, almost by definition, are only supposed to involve a limited number of people for focused testing. If practically everyone were allowed into closed betas then it'd pretty much defeat the purpose for having them.

Well there's always that.

But as far as the very often suggested idea of getting more slots for your last power I have a reasonable suspicion we may yet see that point addressed by the Going Rogue expansion.

The Devs alluded to the idea of adding new "universal enhancement slots" that would serve as a means of post level 50 advancement. This was mentioned in the same 'Market Survey' which accurately predicted details about the MA system and the Going Rogue expansion itself a year ago. Basically this feature would be an alternative to raising the level cap.

Obviously there's no guarantee that it will happen, but we'll know soon enough.