Reiska

Minor correction: Crushing Uppercut's crit damage is based on combo 0, regardless of what level of combo you actually fire it at. So a crit combo-3 CU is 3.56+3.18=6.74.

Still very high, I'm not defending the numbers or anything here.

I can't point to the specific thread or post it was mentioned, but my understanding is that several years ago, a very similar bug manifested with the pet AI, and it was traced to an interaction with movement speed buffs applied to pets. At the time, Castle resolved the bug by simply placing a harsh cap on how much pets' move speed could be buffed.

That cap appears to have been relaxed with Beast Mastery's release, re-exposing the bug.

I don't think it should be proliferated because it would lose much of its unique appeal in the transition; it's got nothing to do with balance or any of that. At a bare minimum, it would have to lose Caltrops (conflicts with scrapper APPs) and Hide (Stalker-specific). Hide would probably be replaced with some other stealth power with different numbers like Energy Cloak or Cloak of Darkness.

It would likely also lose Smoke Flash due to the loss of synergy with Hide and the fact that Placate has very limited utility for scrappers. I'm not sure what would replace Caltrops or Smoke Flash, but the presence of the Weapon Mastery pool on Scrappers limits the options considerably.

Don't get me wrong, Scrapper's my favorite AT, and I'd love to see a set like Ninjitsu on scrappers. But I think the actual Ninjitsu set would lose much of its flavor in the porting.

An issue which Titan Weapons still has on live with Arc of Destruction, at that.

But releasing four vanity pets, one of which is only obtainable as the rarest item in Super Packs and was demonstrated on beta and live both to require an average expenditure of over a hundred dollars, and two powersets that utilize your new four-legged rig in a very short timespan isn't a grab at our Paragon Points?

Sorry, Zwill, I like you, but I have to call shenanigans on that claim. It's so hollow and blatantly false that it makes me angry. The fact that Beast Mastery was released to the live servers in a blatantly unready state, being universally acknowledged as severely underperforming by anyone who actually knew what they were talking about, and breaking the Mastermind pet AI in general even for the other sets makes the cash grab even more blatant.

And clearly I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

You answered your own question. :P

It's lag; if you hit the AS button before the server registers you've stopped moving, you'll interrupt yourself and still pay the endurance cost.

I do it all the time too.

To elaborate on this now that I'm more alert:

If you asked me how the various "pure" damage-dealing ATs should rank in ST and AoE damage, I'd come up with something like this. (I'm not going to try and place Corruptors or Dominators here; I'm not honestly sure where they should go and Corruptor Scourge is hard to eyeball like this.)

ST: Blaster ~= Stalker > Scrapper > Brute > Tanker
AoE: Blaster > Scrapper ~= Brute > Stalker ~= Tanker

This, pretty much. It takes two to tango, and you're tangoing quite well.

Yeah, but those aren't available to non-VIPs at all, under any circumstances. Slightly different situation.

That death risk seems to call out the "fast track" specifically though.

This is a good question, actually. I'd personally opine that for a strictly solo Corruptor, Dark may be a better choice - Dark Miasma only has one power that has no application for a solo player while Cold Domination has three. Tar Patch duplicates the most important part of Sleet (the -RES), Shadow Fall's resistances are arguably slightly more useful than Arctic Fog's, Dark Miasma has two mezzes (one soft, one hard), and Dark Miasma's -regen has better uptime (if I'm right about you being able to use Howling Twilight without dead allies present).

Cold does have more -RES debuffs, but one of them only has 50% uptime at best on SOs, and three of its powers are skips for a solo-only corruptor. It's also relatively light on debuffs which reduce your enemy's ability to hurt you, which is where Dark excels with all the stacking -tohit and -dmg.

On a team, though, Cold Domination is likely miles better, and the inclusion of IOs would slant things further in Cold's favor I think.

Still, I'm not confident enough to say that Dark is better for soloing with conviction. I think it stands a solid chance of being more survivable but also probably does a little less raw dps.

1) Yes.

2) On my L50 StJ/WP Stalker, it did a little over 900 damage and hit me with a roughly -100% recharge debuff. (Mission was run on +1/x8.)

I was a bit disappointed that Rulu-Wade spawned as an EB even though our team had set AVs to on, especially since Ghost Widow spawned as an AV in the first mission.

Still, liked the ending.

I should hope that you know your own PC, yes.

Excellent point.

Very well said. The biggest shortcoming of the "official" incarnate lore, as it stands, is that it fails to acknowledge the existence of non-Primal/Praetorian human PCs effectively.

While this is a typically-blunt statement by Reppu, the general sentiment of it is more or less what some people in this thread have been saying: when you RP within a closed group, and have over time developed your own 'fanon' within that group which deviates from the game's standard canon like the previous example given by Alef, that's fine and perfectly cool. It's when you interact with others in the shared world who aren't part of your closed group that it falls apart; they can only act upon what the shared world at large and its gamemasters (i.e. Paragon Studios' writers) tell them, or upon their *own* fanon - they don't have the means to know your personal fanon, nor (unless they're also a member of your closed group) any reason to believe that your version of events that differs from what the game itself is telling them is 'true'.

To a certain extent, the game's own structure makes "personal fanon" necessary; there are many story arcs in the game which, plausibly, can only happen once, especially where zone arcs are concerned, and in general the game at large seems to assume that most of those arcs have not been completed. Case in point: the Rikti War Zone - at the end of the final mission in the final story arc in Rikti War Zone, you have (perhaps singlehandedly) defeated Hro'Dtohz and stopped the renewed Rikti Invasion. The game world at large, however, does not reflect this; two or three years later, there are still gaggles of Rikti swarming the zone, Rikti Mothership raids still happen, Rikti still occasionally invade city zones, and the Lady Grey TF can still be undertaken repeatedly. A bit of suspension of disbelief is necessary here, for sure; the game has told us our characters have stopped all this! Another good (and much lower-level) example would be the newbie arcs that were added with the Atlas Park revamp. What happened to Aaron Thiery? The game explicitly gives you a choice of his fate - to arrest him and send him to the Zig, or to kill him, and the gameworld at large gives no indication as to which is the "canon" path of that storyline (and, due to phasing, doesn't need to). Some of my characters have killed him, some of them arrested him. Neither is globally "correct" in a shared world sense.

Getting back to the core point here is that yes, when you try to introduce elements of a closed-group fanon in an open roleplay with the shared world at large, generally speaking most other players' characters will have no good reason to believe your characters if their claims are incompatible with the "official" version of events presented by the game, leading to the aforementioned regarding of your characters as delusional. I hope that's clear; regarding those characters as 'delusional' isn't intended to be insulting or disrespectful, but simply a natural reaction on the behalf of other people's characters to someone telling them something incompatible with their knowledge.

tl;dr: when RPing "in the open", in the world we all share, it's best to try and stick as close to the game canon as possible, because that's all any of our characters not involved in your closed groups can know. But what you do in your SG bases or private teams is your business and perfectly fine as long as it's not violating the TOS </obligatory ERP is never acceptable disclaimer>.

Tabletop analogy: My usual D&D playgroup might well think it is funny and hilarious to play a warforged in a 3.5e Forgotten Realms game (because of how out of place such a thing is), but I wouldn't walk up to a gaming table full of people I've never met running a Forgotten Realms game and demand to play a warforged in it, because they don't exist in FR canon.

This never, ever ends well. Just saying. Story and gameplay segregation, etc. Our characters routinely do lots of crap the lore dictates should be impossible. Statesman survived a direct hit from a nuclear ICBM but is somehow routinely beaten back in the middle of Atlas Park by eight non-incarnate supers with seven of his friends backing him up?

Game mechanics really need to stay out of this argument.

Unfortunately I do have to partially agree with Reppu here. The game lore is trying hard to drive home the point that the use of Incarnate power carries substantial risks for that user. Roleplaying that you have a risk-free alternative is disrespectful at best, and very [M/G]ary at worst.

However, I also get to point out a flaw in Reppu's argument - she missed a couple alternatives. The full list of Incarnate power sources we know to this point are:

1) roughly speaking, the entity we know as the Well of the Furies, by the 'fast path', e.g. drinking directly from a physical manifestation of the Well. Four characters we know of on Primal Earth have gotten Incarnate powers in this fashion: Statesman, Lord Recluse, Hero 1, and Stheno. Lady Grey tells us this is a path of constant servitude (to the Well).
2) roughly speaking, the entity we know as the Well of the Furies, by the 'slow path'. This is the path the game canon tells us we are taking.
3) the Tsoo's spirit ink. We are told in the Dark Astoria arcs that this is empowered by the Tsoo's Ancestor Spirits, and that its use actively prevents the spirits of the Tsoo's ancestors from passing on to the afterlife; this is implied to be a great offense in their culture. Big drawback.
4) direct contact with the Furies, the path taken by the Knives/Talons of Vengeance as I understand. Obvious physical transformation drawback.
5) Rularuu, who is, according to Prometheus, another Well. As far as we can tell, this is probably where Darrin Wade is getting his power, likely via the 'fast path'.

There are likely others I'm not aware of offhand.

This is pretty much, IMHO, doing it exactly right.

This is the sort of thing I can get behind, actually; during double XP weekend I saw a Dark Armor tanker that colored the auras blue and was RPing it as water manipulation. It looked absolutely amazing in action.

We already know there are others, but I'll refrain from dumping big lore spoilers in this thread unless people press the issue.

To play devil's advocate for a moment here, and I apologize if this comes off as harsh - really, I don't take RP that seriously here, honest:

City of Heroes is both the game we play, and the established setting in which we're all playing that game. These facts fundamentally shift the argument as regards roleplaying, I think. There's an analogy to be made to tabletop RPing here (bear with me for a moment); City of Heroes is something like most White Wolf tabletop products in the sense that the game system (mechanically) is inextricably tied to the setting and lore, and fundamentally unlike Dungeons & Dragons, where the game system (d20) is independent from the lore.

However, City of Heroes does throw an additional wrench into the mix: we have, canonically, a multidimensional universe. So while normally I would stop here and say unconditionally that playing a character that ignores the game's established lore is outside the principles of good roleplaying, the multidimensional aspect of the game's canon is necessarily inclusive of "visitors" from other settings, with the technical caveat that those settings ought to be the player's original concept, not a copyrighted franchise.

Like Reppu, though, I do draw the line there at the basic ten archetypes. Unlike Reppu, though, I would also make another point: I, personally, am not concerned with how people roleplay their characters within closed groups of like-minded people. If you have a consistent roleplay group and you all want to ignore the game's lore for Kheldians as presented, well, more power to you and I'm not going to fault you for doing that within your group.

On the other hand, if you're playing a "Kheldian who is not really a Kheldian!" with the general public, then my own public RP characters reserve the right to consider yours to be delusional, because to them, Kheldians are Kheldians. :P I consider the whole "not really Kheldian" or "not really Arachnos" thing to be no different than joining a Forgotten Realms D&D game and insisting on playing an Eberron character.

Disclaimer: All of the above should not be taken to reflect my personal judgment on the quality of the specific lore in question - I personally am not a fan of the Incarnate or VEAT lore either, but it is what it is.

Oh, and for the record: with my natural-origin dual blades/willpower non-powered character, I just roleplay her as not understanding (or caring) where her incarnate abilities come from. Perhaps it's a bit of a cop-out, but she's very much the type of character not to look a gift horse in the mouth - it's useful power, she sees no reason to question it.