Rebel_Scum

The only time power orders have been changed, that I know of, is I think tanks used to get taunt at a different level way back in the earliest days of the game. Aside from that, and even that's only something I've heard rather than have evidence of, it's never happened. Proliferated sets having a different power order aside.

It should be noted that Shield Defense only has 'comparable' defense to SR if IOs are taken into account. SR gets to 30% or so to all positions on SOs alone. Shield gets around 22%. This is on SOs, without any pool powers added to either. Really, that's not very comparable. Nor is Willpower or Invuln, they both have much lower defense and in the case of willpower only to a few types. They only become comparable to SR when IOs are added into the equation.

A more notable comparison would be Energy Aura, which gets to 25-29% (depending on damage type) on SOs alone, not counting the buff from using Energy Drain which would push it a little higher. And that set has an endurance refill, a heal and some resists. Since the changes in I21 it also has the +recharge that was formerly the only thing SR had to itself among defense-based sets.

For stalkers, Ice Armor gets to almost exactly SR's defense with 8 stacks of Energy Absoprtion (Doable even on SOs) But has a heal, an end refill and some debuff. And a tier 9 that gives resistance rather than more defense as well as regen and recovery.

So yeah, I think SR could do with a buff. It does need something, but I dunno what. And what they could do without coming up against the cottage rule would be pretty limited, given how 6/9 powers in the set currently exist for the sole purpose of more defense. That's too many if you ask me, but we can't combine them into just the three toggles because cottage rule.

None of the other stalker powersets take that into account that I know of, when balancing their own defense powers. Super reflexes, for example, has exactly the same numbers on all its toggles as the scrapper version except for Evasion which is somewhat higher to make up for the loss of the aoe passive.

That would overlap with Entropic Aura in the Energy Aura set though, might be confusing for some people.

Also, the life drain via doing damage thing would have to work like Fiery Embrace does - Every single power available to any AT that gets Fiery Embrace has an extra damage effect coded into it that only triggers when that power is active. Which is a lot of powers, and thus a lot of effort to put in a similarly coded heal effect that only triggers when this life drain power is active. And for balance reasons it'd have to ignore damage buffs, which is mechanically easier to do. I haven't seen any of the game's code and likely never will but even I can see a huge pile of things that could be broken by trying to get a heal effect to scale off damage bonus. So, probably not worth the effort required on the part of the devs to make it happen. It's a cool idea though, one I'd love to see in a powerset if the time could be found to do it.

One thing worth noting, making the bite attacks look okay would probably be a bit of effort, you'd end up biting thin air more often than not with some of the enemies in the game, especially larger ones. Also biting things like clockwork = omnom, tasty scrap metal.

But then that happens with a lot of powers anyway so meh.

One thing I haven't seen around much lately is Beam Rifle. I saw one on a TF today and I'm pretty sure it's the first one I've seen in weeks. I still see a lot of Time Manipulation and Street Justice, which came out about the same time, but hardly any Beam Rifle lately.

Likely instead of losing tough hide for hide, they'd lose invincibility. It being an aura that scales with nearby enemies and all. Probably tough hide would become a toggle with higher numbers to compensate.

(Obligatory 'but it's too glowy, that's not stealthy at all' comment here.)

My condolences to those she leaves behind. I didn't even know her beyond seeing bits and pieces in RP Virtue here and there, but still... may her soul find peace.

Also, Zartemis asked me to post these since he's unable to do so himself at present. Just a few memories of their adventures together.

Salsa, Zartemis and his character's girlfriend at the time, in WoW.
Salsa and him messing around in Aion.
Her character in Aion.

It should be noted that on every AT that has access to both, Lightning Rod and Shield Charge do the exact same damage, just energy for one and smashing for the other. So having Shield Charge damage if not tagged and Lightning Rod damage if they are tagged means literally nothing.

It should be noted that Lift is not changing at all for dominators. It already had the higher base damage, which it got way back in I think issue 13, when they did the revamp of dominators as a whole. I remember I even PMed Castle about it, the one and only time I've ever done that, to ask why Controllers didn't get the same damage increase. I never did get a reply.

Controller Lift has had lower damage than it should for a long time. On a dominator it was buffed to do the same damage as Mind Control's Levitate, which has the same endurance cost, animation and recharge time but inexplicably did more damage. Only now are Controllers finally getting that buff as well.

Personally I think they just need to redo the New section a little so stuff doesn't stay in there for quite so long. Even stuff that was in the store when Freedom launched some three or four months ago still shows up under New. It needs to have a month or maybe two months timer on it so stuff that isn't new anymore stops showing up after a while.

This the internet. Logic often doesn't apply, and common sense is far less common than the name would suggest.

Much as I'll take your word that you're not, I hope someone went and actually checked to make sure you're not infected with anything on the off chance you might be. It does happen, after all.

Yes. Want. I would pay points for this in a heartbeat, if I had to. Though getting it for free would be nice too!

The only staff I absolutely want is a simple, basic staff. No fancy concept, no over the top glows or anything. Just a long straight bit of wood or metal (preferrably both, as seperate options) to hit people with.

Was something I thought titan weapons lacked - all the weapons had specific ideas they represented, there was no 'generic' titan weapon like there has been with other weapon sets. Makes it a bit harder if you care about concept at all, cause you have to find some way of making one of those weapons match yours.

They'd have to go through and rebalance all the various inherents to be more or less equally desirable for this to be even remotely a good idea, but if the admittedly significant effort to do so could be spared then I think this would be a good idea, not to mention good for the game as a whole since some ATs have completely worthless inherents.

Also, some of the inherents aren't as quick and simple to improve as you might think. Defiance, for example, is hardcoded into every single blaster attack power. The actual inherent does nothing, the damage buff and being usable while mezzed is directly coded into the powers. Likewise with the VEAT inherents, they just have an outright higher base regen/recovery and the inherent power does precisely nothing. Same again with tankers, scrappers, controllers, stalkers and corruptors. All of those effects would potentially need to be hardcoded into literally every single power in the game for your proposed hybrid idea to work. Which doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea, just one that would require an immense amount of effort for comparatively little gain.

Amusing random idea: Genesis Dominator = reduced cooldown on domination, just to further annoy all those who were up in arms about their carefully paid for permadom builds back when they removed the +damage for it during the I13 revamp. Radial would of course increase either the bonus magnitude or the bonus duration.

And another: Genesis Controller = containment damage triggers on confused or feared enemies as well as everything else. Suddenly Mind and Illusion controllers become concentrated balls of murder.

All of this sounds like good stuff to me, though there'll be people that'd hate their game being disrupted by the actions of someone else as far as the zone events based on player actions goes. Though if you make them more localised like the praetorian zone events then I don't see that being a significant problem.

I would happily support this idea, one of those little QoL things that seems obvious in hindsight. Not that I'd ever be likely to use it myself, I'll be subscribing until the day the servers shut down.