Muon_Neutrino

From what I understand, the reason you get these sorts of effects at all is that satellites/moons don't orbit planets in isolation. All the various subtle shifts in planet/etc orbits are due to perturbations from other bodies in the system. If you just had a single central object orbited by a single planet/satellite/whatever, the orbit wouldn't change (barring non-point-source and relativistic effects, anyway). I haven't dug into the math behind this particular effect, but I would guess that the reason we can put artificial satellites into polar orbits is that they're orbiting close enough to earth that the perturbations are so small relative to the earth's gravity that they'd take a much longer time to develop. Plus, satellites have station-keeping capability, so as long as the fuel holds out they can keep their orbit. I'd guess that in these low orbits, perturbations from the earth's slight departures from a sphere (and maybe even atmospheric drag, not sure) dominate over the external perturbations that would cause such an effect.

Indeed it does (or the reverse, I forget which). And as I pointed out the first time this was brought to my attention, it's not just physically inaccurate, it's physically *impossible*. If the moon had been magically teleported into a polar orbit at the launch of the game, we'd have about another month or so before it crashed into the earth.

As for the moon made of debris thing, unfortunately that's not very physically realistic either. The problem is that, if you blow up or otherwise turn something like the moon into debris, it's not just going to sit there as a cloud. Each individual piece will be moving according to its own momentum and the influence of gravity, and you're quite quickly going to get one of two outcomes. If you didn't blow it up hard enough to overcome the moon's self gravity, the pieces will relatively quickly reassemble under their mutual gravitational influence. It certainly wouldn't look the same, but it would become a solid body once more. If you *did* blow it up hard enough, the pieces aren't going to remain in the same area like that, but will spread out into a ring around the earth, escape into interplanetary space, or both, depending on exactly how you blow it up. Bottom line, if it's bound enough to remain as a distinct object in the sky at all, it won't remain as a more or less unchanged debris cloud.

Of course, the CoH universe has magic, so I suppose the explanation could just be 'a wizard did it', but barring that it's not going to happen. Sorry!

Illusion. It's got the two pets, the confuse, the fear - just missing the stun and immobs...

... oh wait.

Yeah, but breakfrees are essentially free and available to everyone. Also, protecting yourself from mez with one is an active thing that you have to think about and manage (i.e. not running out at a bad time), not a passive enhancement you can simply slot and forget about. They're not really comparable.

This. I'm not going to get into another huge argument on this topic (had my fill of that last time, if you want my reasons go read that thread), but I will say that the conceptual objections on both sides are pure bunk. Every AT should get *every single* applicable set, end of story. It should be up to the *players* to decide how their concepts work. And 'AT politics' is about the saddest, stupidest, least defensible reason I've ever heard to do/not do anything, and I'm saddened to see that people still seem unable to let go of their spite.

My two cents. I'll leave this thread to its tired rehashing of the same arguments now.

And this is why I was opposed to this particular method when it was first revealed, and am still opposed to it now. If you want to win back returning customers, you need to put as few barriers in the way as possible. If someone left in the first place, there's a pretty good chance that their interest in the game had waned. If the first thing they see when they return is that the two characters they're allowed to have are both crippled due to effectively having no enhancements, and the very first thing they have to do in game is tediously respec/level up an alternate build (if they even realize that's an option), it's not exactly unlikely to lose them before the game really gets a chance to win them back over with all of the stuff that's been added/improved since they left.

To give an example, my brother was the one who first introduced me to the game. He stopped playing a few years back, just for the general reason of 'not interested enough to keep paying'. He didn't leave because he was no longer interested at all - for example, he's come back and played with me on various reactivation weekends, and I still keep him informed on what's new in the game - but just because he wasn't playing enough to justify subscribing. He expressed some interest when I first told him about freedom, but I was ultimately unable to convince him to come back, and one of the big reasons was that all of his characters would be full of unusable enhancements. It wasn't the *only* reason, but in general he ended up feeling that there were too many hoops to jump through to be worth it. Again, it's all about barriers to entry. If you make it simple and easy to jump back in, people have the chance to become hooked again and you might regain a customer, even if they don't end up spending as much as they used to. If you toss obstacles like this in the path, you lose people before you ever really get a chance to sell them on the game again.

You don't need to just abandon the idea of selling invention licenses. You don't need to abandon the idea of tiered privilege unlocking. But you really do need to make it as streamlined and gentle as possible. Having IOs degrade gracefully in some way instead of being completely locked out would be a very good start.

I dunno if I'd go quite *that* far - at least wormhole is halfway decent now, when you finally get it. But yeah, the rest of the changes don't do much, especially for doms.

Just a quick note, TAoE powers with knockback don't work this way. Knockback throws enemies away from the *originator* of the KB effect, not the impact point. If you're standing 60 feet from a spawn and hit them with explosive blast, the ones that go flying will all go the same direction, away from you. The only time you'll cause radial scatter with explosive blast is if you use it on someone in melee range. The only way you'd have a ranged power that throws enemies away from the impact point would be if the knockback were delivered by a summoned pseudopet at the target.

You are certainly free to skip explosive blast if you like, I just wanted to toss this out there for anyone else who might not be aware of it.