Sailboat

How about this: "Are you HIGH -- damage is not a strength of Ice Melee!"

Yeah. Or when I want to look at my real numbers to see what my defense and resistances are, or test something, and variously kindly passers-by are furiously buffing me as I log into the game. Thanks for the thought, but....

And nothing, but nothing, is quite like bringing you new costume over to show your friend and just as you arrive, someone helpfully casts invisibility on you.

PBs might have it worse than most, but lots and lots of characters have powers they cannot use at times because of other players. Tanker taunt, for example, can draw AoEs onto the squishies. Even straight-up damage, as has been pointed out, CAN possibly be a BAD thing for the team -- ask any Dark Defender who's lured a foe near enough to resurrect the team with Howling Twilight, only to have someone not paying attention kill off the target.

I've seen AoE damage powers horribly misused (Blaster pulls with Fireball, gets wasted by alpha, purple-con spawn runs over remainder of team). And think of all the people you've seen rocking the heal aura in Wentworth's.

There are simply going to be times when some powers are inappropriate and, as hard as it might be to conceive, you're going to have to stay your hand, or annoy others.

That's another sweeping generalization. Surely some people don't even think about it. :P

Psst...Explosive Blast looks radial in nature, but it knocks enemies all in the same direction just like Energy Torrent. Another thing you might know if you played knockback sets.

Now, THAT'S NOT FAIR. The OP asked what we thought. I said what I thought. I was asked for clarification. I clarified.

Unless we're in North Korea, you run the risk of getting dissenting opinions if you ask for opinions. Don't portray me as some kind of monster or autocrat.

Okay, owning up to the hyperbole is straight shooting.

Eh. I still play Diablo 2 (gasp!). A new ladder season started on October 25. The first item our new, dirt-poor characters lusted after was a "cracked sash," a damaged and monetarily-worthless belt that nevertheless allows you to carry extra potions (that work like inspirations in COH). You can't (at first) afford to BUY a sash. But you can find them as drops from enemies, although it often takes a few levels to get lucky and find one.

Diablo 2 is one of the most popular computer games of all time, and just last week, we were grubbing around for trash drops and damned glad to have them.


Dunno about that, but the people suggesting Death From Below are onto something. You can choose from the rewards table after each run and get a small bonus to accuracy, damage, defense, and recovery which can help tide you through until you reach SO-slotting levels, so DOs can be skipped in a pinch. I often skipped DOs entirely even before this trial; the opportunity to easily get the DFB bonus temp powers is gravy.

While I agree it can be frustrating to start out so far down the wealth curve, it is traditional in games to start out weak and poor and to grow strong and rich. I expect new players understand that. I'm not sure that "fixing that" wouldn't be roughly the same as "making the game too easy."

Yeah, that's the attitude that made me rant.

But that's demonstrably untrue. Because of ragdoll, knocked BACK enamies take significantly longer to get back up. This is better mitigation for every single ranged set in the game. It might not be better DPS, but it's better mitigation.

Aren't they already? I could swear they said "Werewolf" not "Warwolf" when I was ToT-ing two days ago.

My wild guess would be that Frozen_Prince is asking how you got the in-game build from a character into Mids'. The way to do that is to download, install, and run Titan Sentinel, which has a button to export a live game build you can paste right into Mids', it's VERY handy.

Right now (as in, the last 2 days or so) there's a bit of a problem with the Titan Network site, though, so I don't recommend linking to it directly until they get the issues sorted out. Aside from this one problem, they're a terrific site; useful, trustworthy, and highly reliable.

Hover used to be pretty good for working like knockback protection, but they changed it a while back, so that now you are unable to act while re-stablizing yourself in midair for a period of time equivalent to the knockback. So I no longer consider it useful against knockback.

True, but Invulnerability's 50% DDR is significant enough to survive considerable debuffing (in conjunction with high defense, especially if you overslot a little above the soft cap). In my experience, Willpower's 17.x% is NOT enough to degrade defense debuffs enough to help. Hence my use of the qualifier "significant."

I'm not persuaded that's enough difference to exempt it from being considered an exploit.

Cranky rant coming, since you asked.

Knockback is a critical part of superhero/villain culture. It's usually good for the team. Certain uses of it can be detrimental in some ways, sure, but certain uses of DPS are ALSO potentially detrimental (don't believe that? Ask any Kin who's seen the target of Transfusion killed before the animation finishes). Do you want to change the game to let people turn off damage, since it can (in theory) be detrimental?

Games are about choosing how to play within the rules, not necessarily about lobbying to change the rules. Sure, pawns in chess would be "better" if they could move any distance and capture in every direction. Chess is old, why do we "still" have weak pawns? Do ranked chess players argue for stronger pawns? Why not?

I don't want to turn off my knockback and, although I don't really have a right to want this, I don't want munchkins turning off their own knockback either, whether that's because they can't figure out how to play with knockback, or because they only want DPS and nothing else. The game's worked this way for seven years and comics have worked this way since they were first published. I'm not against change, but this is fundamental change for what are, IMHO, not-very-good reasons.

I've been annoyed by people misusing area knockback too, believe it or not. (In my case, it's almost always Peacebringers, for some reason.) But the constant pressure to "turn off" or get rid of knockback vastly exceeds reasonable response, IMHO.

For a slightly parallel example, look at all the complaints about slow-animating attacks like Energy Transfer "corpse blasting," i.e., taking so long to take effect that some other player defeats the target first. So what? Imagine that ET had hit quickly, defeating the target -- then the OTHER player's attack(s) would have been wasted by "corpse blasting." In BOTH cases, the target is dead and exp is earned, but there's still monumental grumbling about the illusion that MY OWN click should have done it instead of YOURS. Yes, it can be irritating, but again, not worth all the electrons spilled over it down the years.

Note that resistance-based characters typically have poor defense debuff resistance (DDR), and can be stripped of that defense fairly quickly by some kinds of enemies. Most defense-based powersets have significant DDR and can minimize or even shrug off defense debuffs. So at the high end of durability, resistance-based powersets with a lot of defense investment are (typically) tougher than defense-based powersets unless defense debuffs are involved, in which case the pendulum swings the other way.

Enough enemies have defense debuffs to make this a significant factor, but it's not a dominant factor.